With each attempt at writing this blog, I ran into inner roadblocks. In all my attempts to put words on paper, I couldn’t make anything work.  Nothing felt right. I can usually get into a flow that serves the writing, and this wasn’t flowing!

Then I received an email from my son, Ethan. “Mom,” he wrote, “I think you’ll enjoy this. It sounds like stuff you write and talk about.” He had attached an article in which the author interviewed a sports consultant named Garrett Kramer.

As I read it, I realized the article provided some insight about my writing block.  I had been attempting to generate blog ideas from my intellect. I had forgotten my usual practice of becoming still and centered, allowing an idea to arise from a place deeper than my mind. Once the subject matter arises, I can then use my mind to shape the column as a sculptor shapes clay. The mind is not in charge. It is simply an instrument in the hands of that deeper Awareness. 

In the article, Kramer advocates something he calls “stillpower.”  For athletes, instead of trying harder, getting in the zone necessitates becoming inwardly still. Rather than narrowing their view into a specific focus, the stillness opens them to possibilities. Then training does not take place from intense struggling toward a goal.  It happens from un-attachment to whether they win or lose. Instead of work, training becomes fun. 

Stillpower is about stopping the frenzy in all arenas of life.  It means ceasing to grind out solutions to force performance results. It involves letting go of the instinct to control outcomes.  Kramer coaches people to take their foot off the gas and to stop trying to be “in the zone.”  When we stop controlling, we begin to tap into a success mindset that has given up striving for success. Sounds strange, doesn’t it? 

The result is a true “in the zone” mentality that manifests as the ability to become absorbed into the present moment, without regard for past or future. It feels easy, effortless, and free from force.

Our society has trained us to view the mind – with its logic, its rationality, and its tendency to label and control – as the highest state from which to operate and move in the world.  However, says Kramer, it really represents a lower-quality state of consciousness that makes life more complicated.  When I operate from this lower state, I feel like I’m paddling a canoe upstream against the current, and everything seems like a struggle.

So in writing this column, I stopped paddling. I quit struggling harder from the rational mind, and I became still. I allowed the current to turn the canoe around into a downstream direction. Then the writing became effortless, with no more wrestling to put on paper ideas that went nowhere. 

I had found The Zone.