by Matteus Levell

A few people wrote us in response to the last blog asking: If being in the zone involves inner stillness, focus and presence how do you switch these qualities on?

I’m glad you asked!

To address this question I’m going to start with the opposite assumption. Suppose we had these qualities to begin with and we then ‘lost’ them. What was it that ‘robbed’ us of this virtuous triumvirate?

In a nutshell we were pulled out of our center. This happens simply through life. The five senses externalize our focus. We are ‘pulled’ into the images we see, the sounds we hear, that which we smell, taste and touch.

Sounds innocent enough, but over time we unconsciously lose touch with our own center, our own inner knowing, inner barometer, deeper sense of who we are and what we want – our purpose. All because we are making what is outside of us more important than what is inside.

To turn this around you need a reliable method for accessing and stabilizing an inner place where you can make decisions from, and seamlessly operate from. If you take the analogy of your body as a vehicle then this inner place is like the cockpit.

In my view, those athletes who operate ‘in the zone’ have an innate ability to access this inner place.

So how do the rest of us access this place and switch on the ‘in the zone’ state?

This is where meditation comes in. And not just any meditation, for meditation is a whole world and different techniques of meditation will achieve different results.

In the 1980s French medical doctor and meditation practitioner Samuel Sagan devised a meditation technique specifically for westerners – free of any religious or cultural baggage. Sagan’s technique smashes some of the common cliches associated with meditation. For instance that practicing meditation will pacify and lessen your drive to achieve in the world.

To the contrary this meditation increases your alertness, sharpens your focus and makes you more present.

How? Let’s put some of the pieces together. It helps to envisage your consciousness as a spectrum. Now when it comes to consciousness most people will tell you – well, there’s when I awake – I’m conscious and then there’s the time where I am asleep that’s unconscious.

But precisely there are many stations along this spectrum, and you can’t reduce it to simply being awake or asleep.

Back to the ‘zone’. You guessed it – the zone is a station along the train network that is your consciousness. (Which station did you get off at this morning?).

At one end of the spectrum is the externalization of your consciousness. You’ll remember how are friends the five senses play their part here. When we ‘grasp’ onto an experience we are at this extreme. Grasping here is characterized by a sort of desperate over-eagerness to have the experience. So in the 100m race it’s the guy who’s expending too much energy in his nervous excitement during the warm-up. He is ‘grasping’ at the end result and hence is lost to the present moment, he is ‘getting ahead of himself’.

Now at the other extreme of the spectrum is the deep deep meditation experience – the type when you feel spaced out ungrounded and blissfully spread out. Perhaps lying on a banana chair on vacation in Aruba will have a similar effect.

In the 100m warm-ups maybe there is a guy that is too relaxed. Such that the focus and will to win is not really there. Perhaps he is simply content to be in the final, he doesn’t believe he can win so he is not ‘up’ for the event.

The key to the spectrum is to be able to stabilize yourself at a slight level of involution. Now there is a concept that I want you to absorb.

The term Involution comes from the work of Sagan and refers to the effect where consciousness lets go of the senses and becomes internalized.

This is part of any meditation technique, in the line of quietening the chatter of the mind, becoming still and going inside.

It gets interesting though when you combine this with the spectrum. If involution only leads to blown out states of spread bliss then it won’t directly make you more efficient at a challenging task.

But stabilising yourself at a slight level of involution – well… that is the zone!

Sagan’s techniques, which form the backbone of Vital Switch work, revlove around having a reliable internal yardstick by which to know what level of the spectrum you are at in a given moment. The extremes are more obvious to perceive but getting to the level that equates to the zone takes some patient refinement.

I know what you are thinking. How do we start to understand and perceive this spectrum?

A good analogy is to think of the first settlers to an unchartered land. When they first arrive the place is as foreign and unfamiliar as our spectrum of consciousness is to us.

They get to know the new area and begin to be able to navigate around it by creating maps and establishing signposts in helpful locations. Pathways are forged that link one familiar area to another, and gradually the new inhabitants know the land well enough to access its natural resources for the betterment of their lives.

Signposts are important in any meditation practice. Without them the mind will drift. Many techniques have a strong focus on the breath, others still will have you gaze at a candle. The heart of the technique has to do with where you are resting your awareness. Now there’s a concept that seems anathema to our experience of a busy western life!

Rest my awareness indeed!

But when someone is ‘in the zone’ they are resting their awareness on something (without realizing it). If you are not ‘resting your awareness’ on something then you are either drifting or holding focus with tension. You’ll recognize these two alternatives as the extremes of the spectrum.

Examples of a inner place to rest your awareness are the ‘dantien’ of Chinese Taoism and the Hara of the Japanese tradition. These ‘energy centers’ of Asian Martial arts have been equated to the center of gravity of the human body by western practitioners.

To quote our friends at Wikipedia “A master of calligraphy, swordsmanship, tea ceremony, martial arts, etc. is held in the Japanese tradition to be ‘acting from the hara’.”

The ability to act from somewhere implies a ‘resting’ of awareness in that location. And the Hara (or the Dantien) is not the only place to act from.

More later…