Did You Know That Flow Can Be Active OR Passive? Both Are Necessary For Creativity

Learning how to cultivate passive flow can help you enter an active flow state.

This blog post is now a podcast episode!

(This is a follow-on to last week’s post about using flow for discovery writing.)

If you are any kind of creative, chances are you’ve come across the concept of flow, and you may even actively cultivate flow for your creative work. Flow is a state where you become so immersed in an activity that you lose track of time, and your actions seem to emerge naturally and without extreme effort. Artists often describe this experience as the work doing itself: the words are writing themselves, the music is playing itself…. Athletes also experience flow states. When I enter the zone while skiing, for example, I feel like the mountain is skiing me, not the other way around. I liken it to the feeling of swimming with the current.

But creative work can often feel the other way around, like you’re swimming against the current. It can feel like pulling teeth. The flow state is coveted by creatives but it’s difficult to get into. It requires us to enter an intuitive space, and our rational mind has us in a stranglehold. It doesn’t relinquish control gladly. So how can you make it easier to get into that zone? You can start by cultivating what I call passive flow. This is a more low-key state of flow that can be maintained at all times. You may dip in and out of it, but it’s always there, and when you stray too far from it you can easily reestablish the connection. I liken the feeling of being in a passive flow state to floating with the current – or going with the flow.

Passive flow is a way of living. It’s a state of being and a feeling you get when you are able to stop struggling so much against the way things are and surrender to the flow of life. In the Chinese philosophy of Daoism, this is called wu wei. The characters that make up this word represent the concepts “without” or “lack” and “action.” Together they are best translated as “effortless action.” This is when you are living in harmony with the natural flow of things, and you encounter little resistance to your actions. You don’t waste energy trying to change or control things you can’t, and you accept the way things are and work with what you have already available to you. It’s an easy and pleasant way of living, one that keeps you largely immersed in the moment. It is a type of flow state, but one that is always there, because you’re living it.

Some people use meditation and mindfulness to cultivate passive flow, but that stuff has never worked for me. After years of failure, I made a discovery: passive flow is something we all naturally have, but the way we live our lives has taken us so far from it that we believe we’ve lost it. We haven’t, though. It’s like a stream that has so much junk thrown in that the water no longer seems to flow. But it still flows! It’s just gone underground. We need to clean out the streambed to encourage the water to flow there again.

We can do that by eliminating some of the stuff from our lives that clutter our streambed. We can’t get rid of all of it, but we can still do a decent cleanup job! The stuff that blocks our access to passive flow is anything that causes us to tighten up, feel debilitating anxiety, that makes our lives smaller, that creates trauma – you get the picture. It’s the stuff that makes you feel bad, that you have to force, that doing is like wading through a tar pit. It’s the stuff that causes you harm, that makes you hide, that makes you fearful. All of that takes you away from your flow. And if you have too much of that kind of stuff in your life, you’ll become totally blocked.

It can take time to eject that junk from your life. Some of it feels inescapable, some of it feels like stuff we have to do or put up with. And sometimes we hang on to the junk because we don’t know anything different, or it gives us a sense of identity. Sometimes we don’t want to deal with the grief of letting go. There are all kinds of reasons we hold tight. So start small. Is there something small in your life that drains your joy? Can you get rid of it or stop doing it, even if there are consequences? Try it. Stand strong in your decision, even if people complain or judge you, or you judge yourself. Tell yourself that you’re doing this for your mental health. Your mental health has to come first! Without that, you have nothing. You’ll start to see that things are still okay in your life without that thing - in fact, they’re probably better. Over time you’ll gain confidence and be able to tackle bigger and bigger things. Your sense of empowerment will grow. And who knows what will happen then! Your world will start to open up once you are living in the flow.

Of course most of us won’t ever reach a state of being in that passive flow state all the time – and honestly I’m not sure that should be the goal. I use it as a reference point for myself. I can tell when I’m straying too far from it, or filling it up with junk, because I get that tight, anxious, small feeling. That’s a signal that I need to pause, take a look at what’s causing that feeling, and work to ameliorate or eliminate it from my life. By cultivating passive flow like this, you’ll be better positioned to access an active flow state when you need to. For more on that, see this post. Even though it’s about writing, you can apply it to other creative endeavors. You can do this!