It’s quite an elegant way of describing what happens in the creative flow when your identity disappears, your body dissolves and what seems to be ‘You’ floats by, suspended in the sensation that something else is moving you.

With his charming sci-poetic élan, Csikszentmihaly observes some interesting things about how, rather than arriving at peaks of heightened awareness and performance by chance, there are certain things we can do to get into this flow more often.

He Interviewed 8000 artists, scientists, musicians and monks to find out how some people regularly induce a kind of cocoon of meaningful existence where they tap into the ability to ‘create something new where nothing once existed’. Distilling the two common things all creative people do, he proposes anyone can generate flow states for heightened performance.

First he says, you need to have skill; at least ten years of practice. (Good news for those of us who’ve been making love for at least that long.) If you’re unskilled he says, you’ll have too much attention and anxiety to access the creative flow state. How true of ecstatic bliss too.

The second thing you’ll need is a challenge, for cozy comfort seems to keep you as much out of the zone as too much stress.

Consider the last time you trusted yourself to risk surrendering into an ecstatic state of pleasure. Chances are, afterwards, you glowed with a creative shine for hours, if not days. I’ve been wondering what combination of skill and challenge is required to visit those streaming erotic flow states more often, and most importantly, how we can put those  creative surges to good use.

So stay tuned in and turned on; this is just a peek of what’s coming soon. If I have enough people interested I’ll launch our new Erotic Challenge plus a totally experiential workshop integrating everything I’ve gathered for the last 25 years about how to realize your highest performance through and beyond the pleasure zone.

Meantime, practice your love skills and summon boldness in your bedroom. And remember to consider what it means to ‘stand aside‘ during moments of intense pleasure. I challenge you to become an unusual self – voyeur. Perhaps you’ll discover an uncanny eye for Eros that sees Beauty in the most unusual places, especially inside.

In case you missed it: Flow, the Secret to Happiness on Ted