A flow state entails alignment of goals, energy, attention, feedback, and so on.

When we learn what we can control in our sport and direct our attention there, we make flow possible.

Flow is a pleasant experience. Athletes crave it. But there’s plenty in sport that’s unpleasant.

Opening what’s unpleasant and beyond our control can offer energy that’s deeper than flow.

Have you ever participated in something awesome? Awesome in the root sense of the word—full of awe—in which you gave of yourself as a participant or as a witness (or both), and in doing so, you allowed the boundaries of your conscious mind to dissolve as you connected with something greater: humanity, history, nature, or the divine?

In sport, this sort of experience is often discussed as flow, but the kind of flow I’m talking about transcends the field of play and/or the performance space, be it athletic, artistic, or otherwise.

Carl Jung called such experiences numinous, from the Latin numen, divine will. In a numinous experience, which might be delightful, terrifying, or both simultaneously, we surrender any efforts at control to something larger than ourselves. We let the divine, however you choose to conceive it, flow in.

Flow in sport performance literature (Csizkszentmihalyi, 1975/1990) has to do with performance and engagement. Flow........

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