Mind like water is a visual metaphor for a state of being. A nugget I hope you gain from watching this video is quoted “choice is a function of awareness, awareness comes as a function of meditation.”
So if no-one has ever taught you the goal of meditation let me help you “observe things from a place of non-reaction, which does not mean detachment, but means not attached to an outcome.” And this is my personal favorite photographic mode, allowing my own choices to be fully aware and scooping creative power from the natural surroundings….I hope you begin a practice of meditation into your life to help you create with a watchful eye and this article blesses you with the inertia to start that practice.
Here’s a lovely snippit from Pete Tong’s BBC Radio 1 show - the track is Mark Brown’s ‘For The Journey’ which I wish I could not find an MP3 download of, I can only find it on Vinyl! I heard it on the drive back from NYC’s Photo+ on Julie’s Sirius satelite radio.
Have you decided on the artist for your trigger? I’m also considering some tracks from LAGQ - The Los Angeles Guitar Quartet - on their Labryth album they cover everything from Led Zeppelin to Appalachian folk
I find that the best type of music to edit photos to is something that has a strong rhythm, here’s one from KCRW’s Today’s Top Tune podcast. It seems that tunes where the melody carry both the rhythm and the tune strike a particular chord with my brain.
Practicing a routine to build your ZONE mindset may take an hour a day for the first month. Take as long as you need to fully reach a state of heightened awareness. Build you’re minds acceptance and expectation of THE ZONE with each day’s successful routine, the deeper you internalize the routine the more potent it remains as it is condensed. Give yourself a month, as more time will deepen the connections in your psyche.
The really intriguing aspect of this is how Josh trained himself to trigger into THE ZONE within a single inhalation and exhalation. Shorten your routine slowly. You have been working to deepen your trigger, now you make it portable and lower maintenance. A great first step that would boost your general productivity would be to do your routine while going to work. Don’t go all out and cut down to 5min all at once - give yourself a few weeks just the same as you took to build your trigger.
For me personally this would mean having a 2min routine so that after finishing the hecktic family photos I could jump into my ZONE and access my inner vision while working with the bride and groom, just after I have exausted myself trying to meet the expectations of a diverse group of people. With some parts of the wedding, I don’t have a chance to think ahead or prepare myself with ideas I’m just dropped into a situation and I have to respond to everything - clearing my mind first will help me see the most important pictures.
To close this post I’d like to leave you with one more quote from Josh:
“The real power of incremental growth comes to ear when we truly are like water, steadily carving stone. We just keep on flowing when everything is on the line.” - from The Art of Learning
So while we know that THE ZONE exists, we can’t rely upon heavily charged, adreniline induced, or climactic moments to put us into a creatively charged state. Many competitive athletes have a routine that puts them into THE ZONE when it’s time for them to perform. We’ll call this routine, a trigger.
For some it’s a meditation or memory, for some a song, for some streching/activity will put them into THE ZONE. Does one particular activity come to mind for you? if not, read on and we’ll help you develop your trigger and then hone it for your use.
Josh recommends searching for an activity or place that really helps you feel the sublime, restful, and focused. From there we can work backward to further reinforce a pattern of activities that will induce a calm but powerful state of focus. So the example routine whent like this:
Eat a light consistant (same food) snak
15 minutes of meditation
10 minutes of streching
10 minutes of music
Activity or place of enjoyment, peace and complete presence
So continue this as a daily routine for 2-4 weeks to allow a strong psychological connection to build between the pattern and THE ZONE.
Continue for tomorrow’s post to see how to shorten the routine to jump start your Zone mindset.
THE ZONE - I don’t know how I’d like to highlight it but I feel strongly enough about it that I made a category for it.
My first concrete realization of my zone was my freshman year of college in writing class. Unfortunately, I was critically bored…my highschool education had been more complete than my freshman year of college and I felt it was an awfully expensive year of review. Anyway, complaints aside I was assigned to write a descriptive paper about ‘my favorite place’. The creative genius that I am I defied the professor the gratification of two pages ripped from the thesaurus like all the other robots, I mean students, in the class. I wrote proudly that my favorite place, was not a place at all but a frame of mind I called motion. Not only motion, but motion that slowed motion. Movement that stopped action. A place, where in my paper I described it from the seat of my mountain bike, that ceased conscious thought and where my mind could be in a serene state of balance between exertion and reaction. A place where I could think faster than the tires crossed the trail - without effort. A place which undoubtedly saved me from several broken bones, face plants and scrapes.
On particularly humorous incident occurred on the face of a near vertical drainage ditch between the art building and girls dorm of my college campus. We’re talking about a roughly 30 foot hill, at probably 110º, the top of which emiates from a paved sidewalk, connecting to a side street and across wich is the main campus. It’s a hilly campus, to which ends boys headed up the hill might be tempted to cut up this washed out piece of hill on the loose stones to get to their dorm faster. I’m returning from riding my bike on the trails one afternoon and decide to enjoy the freefall down this hill and ride the speed out through the quad to my dorm on the other side of campus. So I drop in, upon which I see someone walking up the hill on the gravel. Brakes are great, but on a steep gravel decline which I’ve iniated with a small hop - full braking only leads to a skid. So I’m now sideways, approaching unsespecting and stupified student at increasing speed. Full fishtail in progress I am barely staying upright and sliding sideways into a stump from my momentum coming over the top. I hit the stump and I am instantly airborne, not more than 10 feet from the jaw dropping student. Upon examination of my inirta and the angle of the hill, my brain (independent of my input) quickly initiates a shoulder roll - spins me back up on my feet literally 2 feet in front of the onlooking student. As my biking shoes skid to a halt on the loose stones and my knees start to knock the rush of adrenaline jolting through them - I give the student intrupting my ride a few choice words and jump back up hill to rescue my precious bike. Interestingly enough I crashed hard enough that day to put a dent in the downbar of my Trek mountainbike - yet my body’s experience in the zone allowed me to walk away without a scratch (scratch meaning trip to the hospital). Do you have a story from THE ZONE?
I can attribute my ability to get in the zone to my success as a soccer goal keeper. I can recall specific plays from my highschool and college soccer games in ’slow motion’ clarity even these 15 years later. So is there something uniquely wierd about my brain - you bet - but many other people experience these same type of reactions and are also able to slow down time. So the question becomes ‘Can you put yourself there by discipline?’ Josh Waitzkin writes of his experience with the Human Performance Institute and their refining of a training program to allow a person to train themselves to find an optimum zone for performance. The technique to put yourself near, or into THE ZONE Josh calls ‘the trigger’. In order to reach the zone you have to define a path for yourself, then train your mind to shorten that path to a smaller and manageable routine. How to find a build a trigger will be tomorrow’s topic, but one clue is there’s music involved…
Josh trained at the sports psychology organization called the Human Performance Institute, and you can take their free intro profile test here if you like. I have no idea how their full profile could be worth $49 to you, but if you take it and it helps you leave your experiences in the comments.
“Those who excel are those who maximize each moment’s creative potential — for these masters of living, presence to the day-to-day learning process is akin to that purity of focus others dream of achieving in rare climactic moments when everything is on the line.”
What a better description could a wedding photojournalist look for to describe his job. I am sent to an important day in the life of a person to show each moment’s creative potential and connection to the love, support and encouragement they have recieved their whole life. The moment’s are not the limit, as I have thought before — but as I see more clearly — the limit is within my ability to connect each moment to the Tao. Joshua Waitzkin writes of his search for a way into THE ZONE of awareness and conectedness as overcoming his own personal strength. In his Chess competitions or his early martial art’s competitions he relied upon his deep well of personal energy and ability to intensely focus. Drawing solely upon these skills, he could win - but only once. He would be so wiped out from the complete exertion that he couldn’t recover or continue.
My personal parallel in the visual arts is the germ of an idea that I often go into a shoot with. The idea gives me a creative burst to accomplish something, guide something or make something. But I risk being ruined by my creativity if my plans are disrupted, or I am not able to meet my expectations (imagination). I am also limited by my imagination, instead of opening to possibility.
“Truth be told, this is what my entire approach to learning is based on–breaking down the artificial bariers between our diverse life experiences so all moments become enriched by a sense of interconnectedness.”
The search for interconnectedness in my pursuit equals the filling of an image with ‘art’ and not just ‘record’.
“For one thing, now that your conscious mind is free to take little breaks, you’ll be delighted by the surges of creativity that will emerge out of your unconscious. You’ll become more attuned to your intuition and will slowly become more and more true to yourself stylistically.” (p184)
So many discussions I’ve read on how to become a successful artist center around the need for self-styling, a truism to a personal core of expression. But the discussions end there, superficially to my questioning mind, and so Josh Waitzkin rings true to his universal claim. But I’m still left questioning who I am as, the only universal element to my work is that of exploration of the world.
What is the personal trait that you identify as core in your work?
Non-Assignment: Try and time my your shutter to capture the blinks of the person - instead of avoid them. That way we’ll learn to further time, tune and refine my trigger finger. The learning is of course to closer read my subjects and predict their action(s).
I never made this connection, but Josh Waitzkin just proposed their universality as a major breakthrough in his own training. How can learning be linked to performance? I don’t think that he means their acts are linked, I think he’s referring to their depth. At this point in his life story, he’s somewhere between his adolescent and adult years and he’s going to a sports psychology training camp to assess why he breaks down in certain points of chess tournaments. The revelation was that he thinks too long, and gets muddled by the stress of it. I can definitely relate, many times I keep myself at my desk working, when I feel like I’m not making good progress, good decisions, or being particularly productive. In this sense, it’s my will or guilt that keeps me focused - not my ability to focus. I really feel this has been a hindrance since last fall when I became overwhelmed…..
