Dr. Jeffrey Gladden describes how meditation and flow states like mountain biking both create heightened presence and freedom from distraction. When you're fully in the moment without attachment to outcomes, time collapses and your nervous system can reprogram itself.
What I've experienced is that when I go into a meditative state, it's actually a flow state of one sort. When I'm on a mountain bike and I'm in the woods going into a flow state, it's like meditation in motion. But in both cases, it's a state of very, very high presence. You're not really committed to a particular outcome and you're free of all the distractions that come in. You're not thinking about something else. You're not worried about something else. You're simply in the moment, all of time shrinks into one moment, which is quite honestly all there ever is, is one moment. We get distracted by the idea of what's in the past and what's in the future and all of this. But really, if you come into this place of flow, which is really almost like meditation for me, it opens up an entire new world of possibilities. And it sounds like you're bringing people into that space, almost meditative/flow space, to enable them to remove the distractions and the preconceived beliefs to actually be able to go in and now walk through a series of things to reprogram the nervous system.
