Once I started teaching tennis players how to get in the zone, my job turned from boringly redundant to fresh and exciting. Every day has brought something new. Every day has been an experience of creative advance into novelty and greater wholeness. That’s what I get to do for a job. I teach people to become more whole through playing tennis in the zone.
Sounds a bit presumptuous, I know, but what happens when you play your sport in the zone is not just that you have a peak performance experience, but that you also have an experience of self-transformation; a transformation out of the bondage and limitation of your egoic self and into the freedom and fullness of your Authentic Self. Playing in the zone is an experience in which you get a temporary glimpse of who you truly are as an athlete and as a human being.
For me, it’s an honor to teach people how to get in the zone because this experience of consciously creating flow opens the door to a developmental pathway that is often overlooked in sports. It’s called the pathway of “waking up” and it involves awakening to higher “states” of consciousness such as the nondual consciousness experienced in flow. And when you consciously create flow in your sport, you not only awaken to flow’s nondual state of consciousness, you also begin to stabilize its more inclusive and expansive awareness. Over time, this temporary state of higher consciousness can become a more permanent state of nondual awareness. In other words, you can start taking nondual consciousness from the field of competition into the field of life.
This developmental pathway of waking up to higher states of consciousness can be directly accessed by playing your sport in the zone, and as you learn to maintain and stabilize the flow state, you are also maintaining and stabilizing your Authentic Self. So, there’s a lot more to playing in the zone than just peak performance. What you are doing when you shift into the zone, whether intentionally or unintentionally, is creating a higher-order reality. And by learning to get in the zone intentionally, you are learning to create this more inclusive and more expansive reality we call flow – on demand.
Imagine that. You, consciously creating a reality that is more inclusive and more expansive than your ordinary reality. As strange as that might sound, that’s exactly what you are doing when you intentionally get in the zone. You are intentionally creating a higher-order version of reality as well as a higher-order version of yourself: your Authentic Self. And just as flow reality is more inclusive and expansive that ordinary reality, so, too, your Authentic Self is more inclusive and expansive than your ordinary, egoic self.
But this is all talk and speculation until you do it for yourself, and with the developmental pathway of waking up being made accessible through conscious flow in sports, your own development can not only be consciously accelerated, but to top it all off, playing in the zone is way more fun than playing in the norm.
More fun, accelerated development, better performance, waking up to your Authentic Self – what’s not to like?