1.1 Looking inwardly

Deep Flow uses a strategy of looking inwardly to disrupt ocularcentric and technologically informed dance practices that use wearable biosensor technology and or interactive software to requiring one to look outwardly. These forms of practice are reliant on a dancer looking outwardly to interact with visual and aural feedback systems that visualise, sonify, and represent their responses in external media environments, outside their bodies. These forms of interactive practice favour ocularcentrism to drive the work. This may be construed as neglecting the vast storehouse of a dancer’s lived experience that digital or interactive technologies, used instrumentally, cannot capture nor share. To counteract these ocularcentric forms of practice, the practitioner Deep Flow uses a blindfold to focus on bodily experiencing and the pre-reflective when practicing meditative states of flow. This expands and deepens an understanding of our own personal bodily experiences and enables the construction of knowledge from a first-person. The pragmatic use of the blindfold with the meditative techniques, forces one to look inwardly, to focus on embodied dance practice as experience. With the absence of visual and aural feedback or information from the outside, the practitioner in Deep Flow, focuses inwardly on their own embodied experiences, to try and get closer to what their experience ‘feels like’ when dancing in a state of flow. This is a private experience rather than a performance for an audience to look at. To achieve this requires ‘doing’ a phenomenology (Kozel, 2007).

1.2 Doing a phenomenology

Phenomenology according to Susan Kozel (2013), is centered on the validity of first-person lived experience and may be used for the construction of knowledge by doing a phenomenology. This implies sliding across the words, method, and methodology, as the method refers to how to do research and phenomenology is a methodology that has at its root: phenomenon, which means something that happens. ‘It is one of the subjective, experience-based methodologies that is used to anchor practice within research, to overcome unhelpful divides between theory and practice, between the mind and the body and between my solitary experience and shared experiences’ (Kozel, 2013, pp. 4–5).

Doing a phenomenology then, is a way to conduct research as something one experiences on a practical level. It is not prescriptive as practitioners should set up their own methodology based on the project that they are developing. One starts by doing, one then becomes aware of the doing and then finally one refines and selects ‘a line of thought, or a line of questioning’ (Kozel, 2007, pp. 50–51). It uses a method of ‘describing, not of explaining or analysing’ (Merleau-Ponty, 1945, p. viii) and is different to analytic thought, as pre-reflective experience is unrestricted by universal and abstract rationalist notions but operates ‘through resonance rather than truth’ (Kozel, 2013, p. 7).

This orientates pre-reflective experience as being a resonance within the body, unrestricted by universal and abstract rationalist notions of truth. It enables the researcher to practice looking inwardly and doing a phenomenology, to explore phenomenal presences, going back to the body and bodily knowing, the lived experience of embodied consciousness, or the mind in the body (Merleau-Ponty, 1945). This includes exploring the felt-sense (Gendlin, 2003, pp. 100–115) that is a ‘bodily knowing [that] is not an immediately identifiable specific emotion or sensation, but something “fuzzy” and difficult to pin down, yet also clearly “there” inside you, telling you about your situation’ (Boden & Eatough, 2014, p. 162). This requires a focusing method that requires the practitioner to ‘find meaning inherent in the felt-sense, through a back-and-forth movement between words, and their felt complexity in the lived body’ (Todres & Galvin, 2008, p. 575).

2.1 Embodied dance practice

Deep Flow is an Embodied Dance practice. It moves away from Somatic Dance practice, where the (re)education of a dancer’s body takes place (Batson, 2009). Here dancers consciously engage with scores, visualisations, and self-awareness, to facilitate change in habitual movement patterns enabling them to perform more efficiently. They use internal sensory awareness and experiential approaches to self-organisation through movement and visualisation techniques to improve the Body Schema through self-exploration rather than tactile or verbal correction.² Above all, they create an internal awareness of healthier pathways for movement, retraining the central nervous system, to repattern the body’s habitual movement pathways, to reconnect the mind, body and physical sensation found in dance practice.

Embodied Dance practice however goes beyond the more pragmatic approaches of Somatics by using phenomenological methods to explore dance as experience, as it is more focused on embodied, meditative, and heightened state of awareness that synchronises states of flow, of the physiological, implicit, resonant, and affective states of awareness. By looking inwardly directing one’s attention to the bodily senses, the emergence of embodied phenomena such as sensations, feelings, internal visualisations, and thoughts begin to materialise.

Deep Flow is inspired by the Full Body Drop created by Margret Sara Guðjónsdóttir, that uses myo-fascia release, meditation, the emotions and breathing techniques. This requires an ‘intensive deep inner listening and surrendering to inner body systems and rhythms,’ (Guðjónsdóttir, cited in Kozel et al., 2019, p. 4). Deep Flow method also includes other known methods such as dwelling (Heidegger, 1962), listening (Nancy, 2007), direct experiencing (Gendlin, 2003), and flow (Csikszentmihalyi, 1990) however this paper will however only focus on Deep Flow, that is an amalgamation and was derived from all the above methods.

Deep Flow is a mindful practice, whether in stillness or in slow movement, where your whole body suddenly feels connected, lighter, expansive, and effortless, as if gravity no longer exists.

Using internal visualisation techniques and fascia release, it focuses on letting go, and without much physical activity, the sensory motor, neuromuscular and skeletal systems seem to dissolve, the body is perceived as becoming invisible and the dancer sometimes experiences an entwining with the world, a perceptual experience.

You know when you are Deep Flow when your arms float upwards without conscious control, and you explore moving, extremely slow t’ai chi-like movements, with a minimal amount of tension and effort in the body, focusing on equalising spatio-temporal dimensions of movement without the conscious mind guiding the movement. Your mental focus is engaged entirely in this experience. You are no longer aware of your bodily functions, such as the sensorimotor and the proprioceptive systems. Internal visualisations of colour, memories and emotions emerge and flood your mind’s eye; your body sometimes feels like it is melting into the world around you and you are moving in a thick viscous environment. This fosters a state of calm and flowing relations between subjectivity, the felt-sense, the sensorimotor system, the autonomic nervous system (ANS), HRV, fascia, kinaesthetic, proprioceptive, and sensorimotor systems. Attending to every shift of experiencing the physical and phenomenological, the body and mind are experienced as a unified whole, not as parts. The slow deep breathing stimulates the parasympathetic nervous system (PSNS) (Polar, 2020), which releases the fascia, lowers heart rate (HR) and increases HRV. Deep Flow is concerned with the state of flow and calm whist moving very slowly in a standing position. Deep Flow does not seek to investigate the mental, subconscious, and emotional states of a dancer, but is more concerned with focusing on the relational flows of lived and embodied experience.

In addition, the practice attempts to find relations between states of flow and biometric measurements from the HRM and is concerned with increasing HRV through fascia release that induces profound states of Deep Flow. This implies that Deep Flow has activated the parasympathetic ‘rest and digest’ (McCraty, 2016) response via the vagus nerve, the body’s major parasympathetic nerve. This slows down heart and breathing rate and the entire ANS, that leads to an increase of HRV, making you feel relaxed, focused, calm and positive (McCraty, 2016). Achieving higher HRV is therefore an essential part of the method. Reading the data occurs after the practice, a self-reflexive practice that informs the dancer about the embodied state of HRV and its relation to states of flow. The biofeedback is reflected upon and informs the next practice session of Deep Flow.

2.3 Movement Hieroglyphs

Movement hieroglyphs are drawn after Deep Flow as a form of writing from the body to visualise one’s internal ‘body’s voices’ (Steinman, 1986, p. 16). They are created by connecting one’s body to the pen and allowing ‘a bit of body energy to move on the page’ to draw the ‘energy you feel in your body’ (Stark Smith, 2013). These are single line drawings or glyphs drawn spontaneously without reflection using a pen as an extension of one’s body (Figure 2). After drawing a hieroglyph, you reflect on how it was drawn and how it still resonates in your body making notes on the experience.

Figure 2

An example of a Movement Hieroglyph by the Author (2017). Photo: The Author. Reproduced with permission of the Author.

2.4 Figuring-Figures

This was derived from Nikolaus Gansterer (2017) methods of figuring. According to Gansterer, figuring starts in the body of the practitioner. One needs to firstly pay attention to the experiential shifts, intensities, sensations, or feelings in the body before they are represented and made visible externally through drawing or painting. When aware of this figuring, one then composes or creates figures, that are spontaneous drawings-paintings (Figures 3 & 4) not controlled by a drawer’s cognitive abilities but through a body-mind relation. This figuring-figures process may be seen as being symbiotic and reciprocal, a Möbius strip as ‘figuring gives rise to figures, whilst they attempt to activate the figures, create the conditions for (further) figuring’ (Gansterer et al., 2017, p. p. 75).

Figure 3

An example of a Figure by the Author (2017). Photo: The Author. Reproduced with permission of the Author.

Figure 4

An example of a Figure by the Author (2017). Photo: The Author. Reproduced with permission of the Author.

2.5 Verbal description

Certain aspects of Zoë Boden and Virginia Eatough’s (2014) multimodal hermeneutic-phenomenological approach, framed by qualitative social science research, are used verbally describe the experiences of Deep Flow. These are directed toward a documentary camera immediately after the hieroglyph, to ‘express something fundamental about one’s Lifeworld’ (Boden & Eatough, 2014, p. 173) and what you have experienced through your felt-sense and bodily experiences.³ This may include the more poetic or aesthetic aspects of spoken language rather than written text. According to Boden and Eatough (2014), verbal description is a better way to report on felt experience as it is far easier to verbally describe an experience than to write about it, as this requires mental and intellectual work. However, finding the right words to describe the felt-sense is difficult as they are experienced in the body of the speaker as a resonance or sensation (Merleau-Ponty, 1945) before becoming identified as a thought. In these instances, verbal ‘analogy, metaphor, and imagery can offer a means to communicate the complexities of felt-sense experience outside of literal language’ (Schneier, 1989; cited in Boden and Eatough, 2014, p. 163). Verbal translation is therefore needed to put felt experience into words so that a researcher may better understand and find meaning in them. Boden and Eatough (2014, p. 162) suggest a method of interviewing a subject using a list of questions to ‘move from the meaning-rich felt-sense to the fullest possible verbal account of an experience’ (Boden and Eatough, 2014, p. 162), to reach a ‘bodily informed understanding’ (Todres, 2007, p. 2). After answering these questions directly toward the camera, the researcher transcribes, verbatim, what was said and reflected upon. These notes are then used and referred to in relation to the imagery created on that day. Relations between embodied and resonant experience, the verbal descriptions and imagery then start to emerge. Later comparative analyses may also be used to find differences and commonalities in each Deep Flow experience. Multimodally thereby offers various qualitative methods to open the multiple dimensions of experience for exploration, and ‘combining these so as to work simultaneously across different sensory registers’ (Boden & Eatough, 2014, p. 174).

2.6 Embodied technology

During the practice of Deep Flow, the HRM is not looked at or referred to as one is blindfolded, in an embodied state of flow, looking inwardly. This strategy subverts the practice of looking outwardly and replaces ocularcentrism with looking inwardly and bodily experiencing. The biometric data is only read after Deep Flow and is not treated scientifically. It is treated rather as another strand of description that feeds back into the experience of self in Deep Flow as ‘the perception and interpretation of the biometric data feeds back to one’s embodied being’ (Van Den Eede, 2015, p. 151). The experiential self is realised through this relational self-reflexive praxis. However, for this to occur the HRM needs to become embodied by the practitioner, so that it becomes perceptually transparent and incorporated.

The Author uses two phenomenological philosophers’ terms, to explain the embodiment of technology, Martin Heidegger (1962) and Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1945). Heidegger (1962) refers to the embodiment of technology as a readiness-to-hand, where there is a merging of the body with a tool or technology. He uses the example of a carpenter working with a hammer, where he is so familiar with it that he no longer consciously aware of how to use it but is only aware of hammering. Engaged in this action, the hammer becomes perceptually transparent, as the carpenter’s Body Schema adjusts to the hammer, creating an intuitive relationship with it, such as one experiences when riding a bicycle. On the other hand, Merleau-Ponty (1945) describes the embodiment of technology as an incorporation that is explained his thought experiment where a blind man navigates a street with a cane. Where does the blind man’s self begin, in relation to his holding of the cane. Is it at the tip, the handle or halfway? Merleau-Ponty states that it is found in the circuit of material engagement between the cane, the environment and the man’s perceptual experience. Stick, man, and pathway form a circuit of information. The stick, becomes an extension of his Body Schema, is a perceptual and transparent tool that transmits material differences in the environment which he feels through the cane, to which he adapts. The man incorporates the stick into his Body Schema, as it becomes inseparable from his lived experience.

However, post-phenomenologist, Don Ihde (1993; 2002; 2009, 2010) describes the embodiment of technology, and in this case an HRM, as occurring through four human-technology relations with technology that are ‘inter-relational and reflexive’ (Ihde, 2010, p. 42).

1. Embodiment relations: here the technology is embodied into the user’s Body Schema. When familiar with its use, the HRM becomes perceptually transparent.

2. Hermeneutic relations: this is reflected in the reading and interpretation of data generated by the HRM.

3. Alterity relations: where human beings interact and experience a HRM as a digital other or an‘other’ version of the self in numbers.

4. Background relations: where the HRM is not foregrounded in Deep Flow but is understood as being present absenct not directly experienced, and also uses Bluetooth and the internet providing a context for Deep Flow.

In all these descriptions there is a distinct focus on individual experience in relation to an embodiment of technology and data, making Ihde’s I-technology-world (2010) definition clear (orig. emphasis) where subjectivity and self-knowledge are gained reflexively. All descriptions define ways of using HRM technology, that once embodied become perceptually transparent. In addition, HRMs offer a way of reading and interpreting the embodied self in the data, as HRMs do not mediate images isomorphic to the human heart. Through a self-reflexive reading and interpretation of the graphs, data or text, the embodied self is found in the data, as it is the user who has produced the data (Van Den Eede, 2015).

2.7 The interpretation of biometric data and its effects on Deep Flow

A question arises: How may the interpretation of HRM data affect the next level of Deep Flow, given that one enters a meditative state, immersed in a blurred body-mind state of the felt-sense, no longer driven by wilful cognition but by free association. How can the relations between the states of flow and HRV within the duration of the practice, affect the next session of Deep Flow?

The answers could be derived from several factors. After ten sessions of Deep Flow, each one lasting around ten minutes, the Author began to recognise repeated patterns in the data feedback in relation to the time, duration, and onset of Deep Flow. After several sessions of Deep Flow, she began to recognise that when it started, her arms floated upwards and sideways, as if by themselves. This was time stamped by the Author making a low-pitched vocal sound and is reflected in the documentary videos of the sessions. With each session it took increasingly less and less time for this to happen and after ten to twenty sessions, seemed to occur at around two minutes.

The Author also noticed that between the onset and the duration, of at least eight minutes, there was a correspondence between the data and the state of Deep Flow. Higher HRV scores, (which, unlike heart rate, cannot be detected consciously by the practitioner) started at around two minutes and remained relatively stable until the end of the ten-minute session. However, this was not the case for every session. Dancers or anyone doing physical training, knows that not every practice or training sessions are not exactly the same, as nuances of our lives may often interfere with one’s focus and concentration, especially when one is tired or emotionally upset. The Author noticed that whenever she had experienced a bad night’s sleep for example, or if the technological aspects of the research were not working thereby upsetting her, the state of Deep Flow was affected, which in turn affected the scores of HRV. Generally, when stressed or from lack of sleep, the Author’s scores of HRV were lower.

The Author then realised she would have to get a better night’s sleep and/or focus more on her deep breathing and phenomenological methods to achieve a deeper state of Deep Flow the next morning. The impact of this information led the Author to realise that the body, emotion, mood, the subconscious, the PSNS, HRV and Deep Flow, were wholly connected. Achieving higher HRV scores is in a sense the desired outcome as it indicates that the practitioner is in a better frame of mind and has achieved a sense of well-being. It is for this reason Deep Flow is practiced. Not only does it promote a better sense of well-being but also indicates when you are not. However, the more you practice the more you increase your HRV and sense of well-being.