Novelty & Heightened Flow States
What Julia Cameron, Moshe Feldenkrais, Brian Eno, and Neuroscience have been trying to tell the world
Below is the text I wrote for this Instagram post I shared June 15, 2023. (After follows the update!)
How are you seeking novelty in your life today?
What Julia Cameron calls "artist dates", what neuroscience calls "building new neural pathways" - when we disrupt our usual patterns in favor of the new, we induce flow states and lightning bolts of insight.
I used to call this feeling really in tune with myself, but now I see it as feeling safe in my body (parasympathetic state) and breaking free of my usual routine (new neural pathways) which induces serendipitous, magical experiences of heightened states of flow.
I believe that's why creatives love NYC. You walk a block over and discover a park you haven't been to before, but it doesn't have to be that big or out of the ordinary.
One of my heightened states of songwriting flow was induced after I decided to watch a Netflix documentary. First, it was a musician I don't always pay attention to (novelty), and second, I'm weird - I rarely ever watch Netflix (more novelty). It was a total break from my usual choices. Right after, I started noodling on my keyboard and the second verse of a song I felt stuck on poured out of me without any work on my end.
Another time this happened, the novelty came from FaceTiming an old friend I hadn't spoken to in months in my backyard. Another time, I cleaned out my journals and recycled two bags full of paper -- totally out of my ordinary schedule and behavior -- and boom, I solved a problem in a song I was writing in a single click. One of my favorite songs I ever wrote was written complete, downloaded all at once in a single jam, which I attribute to a new kundalini yoga kriya I learned from the night before.
Anything different where your eyes, your ears, you senses are experiencing NEW information creates novelty. If you set an intention, you’ll find it!
Fast forward to January 2025…
…and I’m in an online class with Brian Eno, and he starts talking about novelty.
When I wrote the post for Instagram, I wrote it from my lived experience. A Feldenkrais teacher had asked me to reflect on the times I experienced a flow state, and I realized novel, out of the ordinary experiences preceded them. Novelty and working from a parasympathetic state became integral to the approach I developed for my songwriting process in 2022.
Sometimes it can feel like these flow states - where “good” song ideas just happen, where you can’t explain how they happened but they happened, where there is a self organizing energy - it can feel as if we do not want the answer to be as simple or “hokey” as novelty.
And it’s not just novelty. It’s a combination of both novelty and safety (or playfulness), the parasympathetic rest and digest nervous system.
Flow states are feeling 1) relaxed and 2) alert.
Relaxed = parasympathetic nervous system (rest & digest)
Alert = novelty
That’s why people experience magical synchronicities during the Artist’s Way, both in their art and life. The first chapter is called Recovering a Sense of Safety and you start going on the artist dates and experiencing novelty (breaking old habits and creating new neural pathways) and “problems” begin to resolve - you get unstuck.
If you ever do a yoga class or something like Awareness Through Movement, you’ll probably notice a similar effect because you’re regulating your nervous system AND experiencing novelty within the class. Or when you go on vacation, and you have serendipitous vacation luck - you are both relaxed (because you’re on vacation) and alert (experiencing novelty).