Heroes Not Zombies

There’s something about the idea of flow which really seems to work when thinking about health. In Chinese medicine there is a concept of “chi” or “Qi”– a kind of energy. We don’t use such a concept in our Western model but maybe we should. Why? Well a couple of reasons –

First of all – measuring energy – I’m not talking about weird and wonderful machines that claim to measure energies in a human being – I don’t think we’ve understood what energy is in a biological sense. I don’t mean calories and basal metabolic rates and so on. I mean that sense of vitality, of well-being, of having a certain amount of energy, that’s hard to pin down but so, so easy to know. Think of the 1 – 10 scale and asking people to self-rate their energy level with 1 representing the worst possible energy they can imagine and 10 the best. They can do it in a flash. People have no trouble quickly assigning a number on scale to their current energy state. You can even break it down into different energies – mental, physical, emotional for example, assessing each using the 1 – 10 scale. People can do it easily. What are they doing? How do they assess their energy level? What are they measuring and how? It’s not at all clear but it still seems both possible and useful.

Secondly, there is the idea of energy as flow. In the Chinese system chi isn’t just energy that sits there humming away at a certain level. It’s something more dynamic than that. They have descriptions of this energy as flowing or becoming sluggish or even stopped. So for us, we can not only measure our energy levels but we can sense the flow – is my vitality flowing? Is my physical, mental, emotional energy flowing? Or have I become sluggish, or even blocked? Maybe we can just adopt the Chinese concept without looking for a thing called chi, and without taking on board all the detailed dogma of TCM chi?

Csikszentmihalyi uses the concept in relation to psychological processes in his studies of happiness. I like his work and I think he’s described something very real by using the concept of flow, but I’m meaning something more holistic than he does. I mean flow in the sense of the whole organism, not just a psychological state or a function of mind, but also the function of all the body’s systems and processes.