getting “in the zone” by staying open

“Open” is how I feel when I am “in the zone” which is a phrase used a lot by jazz artists who improvise. Both terms are used by practitioners of meditation and free diving as well and it turns out they are talking about the same thing. When free diving the experience is closer to removing inhibition as you lose your fear of being submerged underwater when you are an air breathing mammal doing an activity that is directly defying death, and blatantly going against your innate nature of self preservation. As soon as the fear is gone, you can free dive to your max potential. I remember taking college classes in jazz improvisation (4 semesters worth) and in class, people did some of their worst improvising since they were under pressure, being graded, being watched by their fellow students and their professor during a morning class to make it that much worse. The very same people on the band stand at a live gig at 3AM after some drinks and dancing on their breaks could improvise like Coltrane. This is because they were blocked by their fear, stress and racing thoughts rather than letting go. What do all these disparate things have in common you ask? All of them and several more activities have been measured by EEG to create alpha waves in the brain. This neurological state is what artists of all stripes would call “in the zone” and it requires that you are “open” and that your racing rational thoughts are turned off. Another name for this state of mind is a “flow state” of consciousness.

For me, the quickest way to get open is through expulsion, play, and channeling the more primal aspects of human nature. Yogic breathing or pranayama is another way to get in the zone. Essentially what is going on when you do these exercises is you are stilling, and quieting the rational mind. In Eastern cultures this stilling of the mind is considered essential to being whole in your humanity, so it can serve you in more ways than simply allowing you to be more creative musically. Westerners tend to think of this process simply as relaxation or stress relief, but that is a reductionist way of looking at something so important.  Without connecting to the emotional, irrational, truth in the body, you are unbalanced flailing around in only half of your potential and you’re going to create music that sounds like its coming from your head which isn’t going to move anyone. For us in the West, getting started down this path can be difficult at first. My rational senses are so strong that I have to go through what amounts to fits of unacceptable behavior in order to prime the primal pump within. Some people have suggested that our modern lives are so cluttered with noise and movement that still meditations are not effective anymore which is why they suggest active meditations where you do a repetitive task with focus to allow the storm in your head to silence. Also don’t think of “meditation” as this big scary serious and foreign thing. It can be almost anything as long as it distracts you from your thoughts. I like to play with toys in a childlike fashion, get silly, crack stupid jokes and laugh a lot. In the Scorcese short film Life Lessons the Nick Nolte character plays basketball inside his art studio loft before ever putting brush to canvas. Walking or dancing may also qualify as an active meditation as long as you can do it in a way that makes the busy mind cease. I also jam a lot, which is an improvisation method, I do pure jazz improvisation as a warm up to writing other forms of music, I like to play scratch DJ on some vinyl, or fiddle with knobs on my synths to make the most extreme noises possible in that childlike play approach as well. For me extemporaneous musings such as this equate to being an active meditation.  Disconnecting from utilitarian function allows you to get lost in what you’re doing, and that’s where you want to be. Once you’re there, all your formal musical projects with deadlines all seem to fall into place. All of these things I did intuitively at first and much much later came to rational discoveries that showed me how and why this might be a good thing to do.  When Johnny Depp met Hunter S. Thompson to study for the Fear and Loathing role, Hunter instead of shaking his hand, zapped him with a cattle prod, then took him home, started drinking whiskey, and they went out back and started blasting holes in all kinds of stuff with a shotgun. On the surface it sounds insane, but when you think it through in the context we’re talking about here, it makes a lot of sense, just not rational sense. What is rational about a festival like Burning Man? Nothing, but it is very human and spurs a lot of creativity. Maybe the writing analog for this would be rap freestyling, free writing, quick and sloppy poetry or prose, writing one word on many different pages and rearranging them or cutting them up with scissors or setting them on fire. William S Burroughs cut up methods worked like this. He was an intensely creative writer and seemed to understand what the creative processes effect on the brain well when he coined the phrase:

“exterminate all rational thought”

Now, you’re in the zone.