cedric reeves wrote:
I did three sessions tonight on the app. Nice experience. It's exciting to think of the potential of it.
Great to have you on the network, Cedric. Like you, I'm excited about the potential. There is something about sharing my moment by moment experience with someone that feels very healing to me. I don't get the same feeling anywhere else. I'm wondering about the potential for social noting to help with depression, since it's a low-risk and low-time-commitment way to get really connected with another human being and to feel heard without feeling judged even when you are in difficult states like despair and self-critical thought loops. Something about objectifying the experience can really take the sting out of it.
I've also been playing around with a way to reliably enter a flow state by doing a variation on the main social noting technique. This version starts with a binary note where the only options are "thinking" and "not thinking." Thinking is defined here as little or no narrative thought. Of course, there is still thinking, so we're really distinguishing two different modes of thinking. The terminology isn't precise, but once you get the hang of it, it works great. Then, as a subset of "not thinking," you introduce a third possibility, which is to note "flow." Flow is defined as being so engaged in your momentary experience that it wouldn't occur to you to want it to be other than it is. In a moment of flow, there is no aversion or reaching for anything.
My experience so far is that this exercise does reliably lead to flow states, which is cool because there is nothing that feels quite like flow; it's a highly desirable condition, and worth cultivating for its own sake. (Note that cultivating a flow state or any other state is orthogonal to what might be described as awakening or enlightenment, but is nonetheless valuable, in much the same way that concentation states, aka jhanas are highly prized in early Buddhism even though it's understood that they do not lead directly to awakening.) Since it's not uncommon for people to go to great effort and expense to access even a few seconds of flow, for example going skydiving or rock climbing, or riding a roller coaster, I think it's remarkable that there is a way to access flow through social mindfulness techniques. This is one of the things I've been really interested to explore lately, and I'm feeling optimistic about the results.