The Japanese Concept Of Mushin, How It Relates To Goals & How It Can Help In Performance & Peace

What is Mushin? Its Relation To Goals & How To Tap Into Mushin For Peak Performance & Peace

Photo by Tianshu Liu on Unsplash

“Anxiety is thought without control, Flow is control without thought” — James Clear

If you were given a bowl of dirty & murky water & were asked to make it clear, what would you do?

Most people would suggest to filter the water or boil it so that the dirt is removed. However, if you let the dirty water sit for a certain period of time, all the dirt settles on its own. The water becomes clean & clear after a certain period of time & that’s how our minds also work.

In my last post, I elucidated the difference between ‘thoughts’ & ‘thinking’, which you can check out at length below.

Like the bowl of dirty water, our minds will also eventually settle if we don’t try to filter, react or boil it. “The natural state of water is clear, & the natural state of our minds is also clear”, suggests Joseph Nguyen whose book Don’t Believe Everything You Think I’m currently reading.

“If your life is unclear, disorganised or stressful….it’s only because your thinking is stirring up the dirt, making your mind cloudy & difficult to see ahead,” he adds.

Thinking is the root cause of all your suffering Nguyen suggests & he compares thinking to quicksand stating that the more you fight it & the more you try to suppress or eradicate it forcefully, the worse it gets.

Moreover, the only way to beat thinking is to just “let go” & wait for your mind to return back to its natural peaceful, ‘clear’ state.

We can’t control the oscillation between thinking & non-thinking, it’s part of our human make-up & part of being human. It’s impossible to sustain ‘non-thinking’ 24x7 but we can minimize our time spent thinking & find more time in the ‘non-thinking’ state, thereby feeling more peaceful, joyful & happy.

What brings peace is to know that we always have our natural ‘non-thinking’ peaceful state underneath any kind of thinking that we experience.

Mushin — The Flow State

Photo by Mor Shani on Unsplash

So where does Mushin come in?

Mu (無) is nothing or nothingness, and shin (心) refers to the mind. "Mushin is the mind of no-mind.”

The ‘non-thinking’ state is actually Mushin. It happens when we’re totally engrossed in doing certain things. For me it’s when I’m playing my instruments or making music on my laptop & at times while writing. But you can analyse what activity brings you into a state of ‘mushin.’

Sportspersons also experience ‘Mushin’ when they’re totally ‘in the zone’ or ‘in the pocket’ & are playing at their peak. Being a Japanese samurai philosophy as well, it also relates to combat.

The next pass, the next punch, the next note, all happen in the state of Mushin.

“Mushin is achieved when the mind is free from random thoughts, free of anger, free of fear & particularly free of ego”, writes Nguyen in his book.

It’s a peaceful state of focus & concentration & we do our best work when in this state.

Mushin For Goals & Ambitions

“There are no limitations to the mind, except those we acknowledge” — Napoleon Hill

The author Joseph Nguyen extends Mushin to relating it to our goals & ambitions by delightfully bracketing our goals, dreams & ambitions into two buckets, i.e. goals created out of desperation & goals created out of inspiration.

He suggests that where the goals come from determine their nature.

Goals created out of desperation are usually because we want something out of them & make us feel daunted, stressed out & anxious. We feel scarcity, urgency, heavy & like they’re a burden. Self doubt seeps in & we feel a constant lack of worth if we don’t achieve them.

Goals set in the state of desperation are needs goals and not ends goals. We set the goal to accomplish something else.

For example starting a business to make millions so that we have financial freedom, or working that extra bit to make more money or doing anything because you want something out of it. We feel like we have to do these things & not want to do them.

Paradoxically, even after we achieve the goal, we eventually return back to the same feelings of lack of worth & feeling more empty & wanting more.

I’ve touched upon this in an old piece based on the philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer’s perspective.

Goals set out of inspiration, on the other hand, are born out of Mushin & make you feel like they’re a calling, you feel expansive & deeply moved & inspired. Instead of feeling like they’re an obligation you feel compelled to do them.

“In this state we are creating because we feel deeply moved…. it feels like there’s a powerful force of life coming from within us….This is why painters paint, writers write, dancers dance, singers sing, even if they never get paid or make a living from it. When you feel pulled by a force to create something you gravitate towards it, you feel compelled to do it. When you feel like this, you’re creating from a place of abundance not lack.” Nguyen says.

Goals from this state are because we want to & not have to. Not for any other reason.

“This feeling of deep inspiration…. comes from something greater than us. I’d like to call it ‘divine inspiration’,” he adds.

It’s an expansive state & we feel whole, fulfilled & brimming with abundance & we don’t judge, compare, rationalise & it doesn’t get diluted by thinking.

Everyone experiences this in their lives. Think about all the moments in your life you felt divine inspiration when it felt like it was a calling. When you did something you truly wanted to & were inspired to do it. It doesn’t matter whether you actually created something or not. But rather, what it was & how you felt. It comes from the state of Mushin.

Of course, the world elicits the need for both kinds of goals — money being the end target for a desperate goal & divine inspiration seeping in for a inspired goal. It’s not good or bad if you have majorly desperate goals, after all the bills need to be paid & everybody wants financial freedom but the ideal way again is to balance them & oscillate between them.

The practicality of thinking & just the way the world is, entails the need to achieve desperate goals but balancing them with more inspired goals can lead to more fulfilment. In some cases, especially for creative people, their inspired goals can also lead to that ol’ gravy train of money. However, it’s all about balance.

It’s a means goal vs an end goal, the latter leaving you fulfilled & the former leaving you wanting more. So balance it as much as it suits you.

Mushin In Performance

Mushin or the Flow state is “an optimal state of mind, when we feel our best and perform our best”

Neuroscientists have discovered that when you’re in the ‘flow’ state the Neo-cortex amps up dramatically, enhancing & increasing learning speed and the prefrontal cortex temporarily shuts down, making us slightly lose our sense of our selves and a sense of time.

Renowned psychologist Mihaly Robert Csikszentmihalyi coined this the ‘flow’ state.

This state makes us perform outstandingly and enhances creativity considerably. And it’s a state that musicians, athletes, dancers and yogis access more often than others, which we’ve come to expect as studies of this ‘flow’ state reveal.

For me, working on producing music or when I’m completely feeling a song and performing by feeling it, I perform significantly better and I’m totally ‘in the zone’.

This can happen to you too, whether you’re in full focus while working on an excel spreadsheet, or coding a program, or in a brainstorming meeting, or reading, or painting or drawing, or exercising; it’s totally subjective.

Ask yourself:

1. Where am I when I’m in my flow state the most?

2. What am I doing on the outside and more importantly, what am I doing on the inside, when I feel this flow?’

3. Why do I feel this flow? Why is it meaningful to me?

4. How do I shift into the flow state on purpose and with purpose?

You can read more about tapping into the flow state or Mushin in an old article I wrote based on a TED talk by Diane Allen.

You can also check out an old post about a couple of apps I use to consume books these days. They’re really cool, so go ahead!

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