FLOW & UNITY

By Scott Ford

What unifies EVO Sports as a coaching collective is our belief in the transformative power of sports, especially when sports are played in the transformative state of being we call flow or playing in the zone. Flow is more than a physical state of being, more than a mental state of being, and more than an emotional or spiritual state of being. Flow is a unified state of being that transcends our normal state, which is dualistic, and in which we feel separate from the objects in our field.

Our flow states include these fields of dualistic separation, but then transcend them with fields of nondual unification in which we are unifying with the objects in the field, just as the objects in the field are unifying with us in this ongoing process of player/field unification that manifests itself as our flow state experiences of playing in the zone.

Unity is the center of gravity at EVO Sports. We are a community grounded in unity, and our energy comes straight from the unified source of all being which, when you think about it, is an ever-present source of universal energy coherence that not only empowers an expanding cosmos but simultaneously empowers its expanding parts. 

Humans are expanding parts of an expanding cosmic whole, and we all have something in common: our expansion as conscious human beings always takes place in fields of potential human expansion. In sports, our playing fields are fields of human expansion. They are marked and bounded by the dimensions of the field as well as their rules of play and the tools we use to play within the rules.

Playing fields are also experiential fields, and our experiences of performance flow, whether they come by random chance or by intentional choice, are experiences of nondual player/field unity. Nondual means not two, undivided, unified, one without a second. Translated into sports, nondual means the player and the field are not two, they are undivided, player and field are unified, and the experience of player/field unity is one without a second.

From the perspective of the field, flow is a unified field experience, and it is this unified field experience that is both a human privilege and a competitive advantage. Competing in the zone is as good as competition gets. Getting into and maintaining a state of competitive performance flow throughout our competitions not only gives us a competitive advantage in the field but also gives us the privileged experience of unifying with the field of competition itself.

Competitive advantage plus privileged experience, grounded in nondual unity. Hmm…sounds like a recipe for successful human expansion, even at the cost of our dualistic nature. Flow is not, repeat – NOT – a dualistic state of being, which means shifting from our normal performance state, which is dualistic, to our nondual flow state, which is not dualistic, requires a shift from being dualistic human beings to being nondualistic human beings, which is the developmental challenge of our age.

Why would we take up such a challenge? The most obvious reason is that unity transcends duality just as playing in the zone transcends playing in our normal performance state. Flow is a state of player/field unification whose nondual performance experiences are both privileged and highly competitive – and, I might add, way more fun than our normal performance experiences.

There are different terms used to define this optimal human experience of flow, but everyone who has ever been ‘in the zone” in any of its forms, has experienced the transformative power of flow, and its nondual state of player/field unity. It is this nondual unity that is the ever-present ground of EVO Sports.