It seems that getting in the zone, flow or killing it... what ever you want to call it is so easy when you are involved in a sport, skiing for example most people like the the nice smooth runs that are predictable. But the unpredictable is the part that most people stay away from, you know the BIG FEAR creeps in and we stay the same as we have always been. Flow can come from skiing, martial arts, just about anything can fit in, something that you can lose yourself in, where time blurs and you move with little or no effort, you connect to the force of the universe, your breathing become refined, you make that connection to the force behind the breath.

Silicon Valley computer coder may experience a midnight epiphany as being in “the zone” and see streaming zeros and ones like the code from The Matrix; a French peasant girl might experience divine inspiration and hear the voice of an angel; an Indian farmer might see a vision of Ganesh in a rice paddy. But once we get past the narrative wrapping paper—what researchers call the “phenomenological reporting”—we find four signature characteristics underneath: Selflessness, Timelessness, Effortlessness, and Richness, or STER for short.

Why is it some much harder to apply this to or work? is because we are not invested, or the environment is not what we think it should be, we have been trained by the system that work and life are separate...

So, when we do experience a non-ordinary state that gives us access to something more, we feel it first as something less—and that something missing is us. Or, more specifically, the inner critic we all come with: our inner Woody Allen, that nagging, defeatist, always-on voice in our heads. You’re too fat. Too skinny. Too smart to be working this job. Too scared to do anything about it. A relentless drumbeat that rings in our ears.

This seems to be more prevalent at work