One night, after completing a 92 day period of intermittent sobriety, I smoked a joint with friends in a lovely park overlooking the city. In between laughing, coughing and making plans to get snacks, I started wondering if - high on Marijuana - I was in a state of Coherence?
Getting my laptop, firing up the Heartmath software, connecting the USB cord just seemed like too much work (hey I was stoned!), so I just laid in bed and used the emWave2 (I seriously doubt I'm the first one to do this).
It turns out I wasn't in a state of Coherence, it was actually a pretty normal meditative HRV training session, I started in the red zone and completed 4 green Coherence levels in about 15 minutes, with a big smile on my face, taking a lackadaisical tour of my personal mental happy places. What's interesting though is what happened a few moments after I finished; I found myself in vivid flowstate.
I recently finished Steven Kotler's excellent book on flow science and application, where it's explained that the religious experience of worship or the personal feeling of connection to a higher power is a classic flowstate. This really hit a cord for me because I was very religious for a number of years and have definitely had some very deep religious flowstates.
The sensation that hit me mere moments after powering off the emWave2, transported me through time and space back to the evangelical church in suburban Colorado where I used to worship with a degree of passion that few other things I have embraced over the years have matched. I felt an immense sense of clarity, introspection and optimism, it was one of those few times where I felt just like the character in the movie Limitless. Had I simply dwelt on this sensation I probably would have been moved to tears but I also had a serious creative high keeping my mind very busy. This sensation in conjunction with weed and the emWave2 was completely novel to me, I very rarely smoke weed as it mostly just makes me feel bored and lazy. This instance, I kept coming up with productive ideas for my writing and businesses.
I tried to read a novel that I'm engrossed in right now and barely made it two pages as the book inspired a whole host of other powerful ideas.
I was also still a little stoned though; which made typing ideas into Evernote very annoying - when I'm high I find using technology very tedious. Obviously, I would have been more productive if I wasn't high.
It ended up being something of a double peaked flowstate, about 40 minutes later as I was finally about to go to sleep, I had a rush of atmospheric sensations, I felt the universe breath a little on the back of my eyes and again I was moved almost to tears as ideas flowed out my unconscious.
A search of Pubmed cross referencing Marijuana and flowstates yields no results but the Internet is rife with similar reports as mine.
