by Oli Anderson, Transformational Coach for Realness
How to Live in the Flow State Instead of Stagnating in The Void
We’ve all had those powerful moments of connection and vitality when we feel fully alive:
The world opens up, everything makes ‘sense’, and whatever action we might take becomes effortless and real.
You might have experienced it when you were painting, climbing a hill, deep in the midst of a creative project, or simply sitting with someone you love while time dissolved and you melted into the world around you.
Whenever you’ve experienced a moment like this, you entered what is known as the flow state:
You didn’t force anything; you didn’t perform a role – you simply merged with the moment and found yourself living life rather than managing it or trying to ‘deal’ with it. During those brief windows of time, you met reality without distortion, breathed with and into it, and became whatever it is that you already are.
What’s interesting and also unfortunate is that most people treat these flow state moments as rare novelties – little glimmers that occasionally interrupt “real” life but don’t really mean anything in the scheme of things as a whole.
Our general assumption is to treat the flow state as though it’s dessert and the supposed main course is the grinding, fragmented, anxiety-ridden existence we’ve become accustomed to in the Void.
Collectively, we’ve learned to call that version of ‘reality’ the ‘adult’ world and to treat it seriously even though it’s completely unreal and so is most of the responsibility, identity, success, expectation, and performance that comes with it.
Somewhere along the line we started to believe that the flow state is the exception rather than the way we’re actually designed. We were wrong.
Despite how we’ve been conditioned, it’s the world that most of us inhabit day-to-day that’s actually unreal because you don’t live in “reality” when you feel disconnected, constrained, shallow, blind, split, exhausted, and numb to yourself and life.
When you’re living like this you’re actually in The Void.
Let’s dig a little deeper:
The Flow State: What We'll Cover in this Article
- How to Live in the Flow State Instead of Stagnating in The Void
- The Void: The Dreamworld Most People Call Real Life
- Flipping the Script & Making Flow the Default
- Escaping the Dreamworld: Assumptions of Wholeness
- Escaping the Character: Releasing Ego and Welcoming the Shadow
- The Consequence of Staying in the Dream: Unicornitis
- Building Flow as Real Life, Not Just Moments
- Three Pillars for Sustaining The Flow State
- The Final Word: When Flow the Flow State Becomes Effortless
The Void: The Dreamworld Most People Call Real Life
The Void is the psychological and existential dreamworld that forms when you become disconnected from the truth about yourself, the world, and reality:
It isn’t evil, it isn’t a punishment, and it isn’t some great cosmic conspiracy – it’s just what happens when you become more fragmented than whole.
Once this fragmentation occurs and you find yourself living in the dreamworld- almost always because of the Unholy Trinity of shame, guilt, and/or trauma – you construct something to try and survive within it (despite it always feeling a little unnatural and ‘off’).
This something is the dreamworld character – the ego identity you learned to play in order to keep functioning within the imaginary confines of the Void.
You don’t merely ‘have‘ this kind of dreamworld character – you become absolutely convinced that it’s who you really are.
This is the biggest the tragedy of life in the Void:
It convinces you that a limited fiction – a set of learned responses, defensive habits, and image-based behaviours – is the whole of who you are.
The Void is a trance kept alive by assumptions of separation which is why you operate in the Void as though you must control, defend, compete, prove, and chase at all time.
Everything in the Void is scarce. Everything is urgent. It’s all outside of yourself. You can’t merge with life because you’re too busy fearing it, managing it, or trying to master it.
We need to understand all this when it comes to understanding the reality of the flow state, because flow is what happens when you wake up from this dreamworld and connect to your natural state of realness as a human being who is no longer blocking their own wholeness.
Those little glimpses of flow state that we all have at some stage in our lives are not rare treats, glitches in the matrix, or accidental blessings – they’re very real reminders of how you’re meant to live when you’re real rather than locked behind the mask of the dreamworld character in the unreality of the Void.
Human beings are designed to grow and flow into deeper wholeness which means that by nature we’re interdependent with reality rather than separate from it.
The Void is separation from this but finding real flow is a very real reunion.
Flipping the Script & Making Flow the Default
You don’t have to live in a mode where you are lucky if two or three weekends out of a whole year allow you to actually feel alive.
You don’t have to be satisfied with brief holidays where you temporarily ‘escape’ your regular day-to-day life in order to remember that you’re capable of joy, realness, and spontaneity.
You can flip the script and become someone who experiences flow not as novelty but as baseline.
This doesn’t mean bypassing practical reality – it just means becoming available to realness with sustained consistency.
If this all makes sense and you’re ready to build flow into your life, there are two essential starting points:
- Acknowledge that the Void isn’t real.
- Let go of the character you built to survive in it.
These two moves are not philosophical ‘games’ that sound nice – they’re are structural shifts back into the natural design of your REAL life.
Escaping the Dreamworld: Assumptions of Wholeness
The dreamworld of the Void only began because you fragmented yourself at some level – emotionally, mentally, spiritually – and then projected that fragmentation outward.
Once fragmentation and separation became your internal worldview, you began to see separation everywhere: relationships, ambition and possibility, the way you identity, the way you use your time, and the ‘meaning’ you see or don’t see in life.
This kind of fragmentation is why so many people feel like they are watching life happen or have it happen to them rather than participating in it and working with it to grow real.
To escape the Void, then you first need to shift into assumptions of wholeness and connection over fragmentation and separation.
When you approach reality from a stance of wholeness over fragmentation, then everything changes in a very REAL way:
- You stop seeing life as a threat because your nervous system starts to regulate.
- You stop believing you must earn your own realness and flow.
- You stop thinking your worth depends on performance and so you can step into presence.
Wholeness is simply the attitude that the real version of you you already belongs in life rather than needing to manipulate your way into it because you’re identifying with a fragmented and unreal version of yourself (that dreamworld character).
As soon as the assumption of wholeness returns, flow activates and you flow back into reality itself.
Escaping the Character: Releasing Ego and Welcoming the Shadow
The ego isn’t ‘evil’ or even just ‘bad’ – it’s simply your unreal reaction to the Void and the persona, patterns, mask, identity, and defensive structures you built when life didn’t feel safe, coherent, or true for whatever reason (usually because somebody living in the Void pulled you into it with shame, guilt, and/or trauma).
If the Void is the dream, then the ego is your dream character.
To enter consistent flow, you must see the ego as a reaction rather than a real self because when you do this the shadow self – which is all the ‘good’ and ‘bad parts of you that went underground while you performed as the dreamworld character – begins to rise.
These hidden ‘parts’ aren’t dark in the moral sense – they’re just dark in the sense of being unilluminated.
When you start to shine light on them again you can consistently enter the flow state.
If you don’t know, the shadow contains a lot of potentially ‘bad’ things that are still real like your anger or whatever (which can still be ‘good’ if you use it in a real way) but it also contains a lot of very ‘good’ things (aka the Golden Shadow).
Examples of these ‘good’ things waiting to burst forth include:
- Your relationship with truth
- Your deeper impulses,
- Your drive towards wholeness
- Your capacity for real connection
- Your creativity
- Your intuitive alignment
- All of the goals, qualities, and values that will allow you to embody all this ‘stuff’ and take real action
The ego always blocks the shadow self because it fears that truth will dissolve the character entirely and it’s right….
When the shadow returns, wholeness returns and when wholeness returns, flow eventually becomes effortless.
The Consequence of Staying in the Dream: Unicornitis
If you don’t escape the Void and you don’t release the character, you develop Unicornitis:
Unicornitis is what happens when you turn substitutes for the truth into ultimates which basically means that instead of seeking truth, you seek compensations for the Void and instead of shadow self integration, you chase enhancements to strengthen the dreamworld character’s grip over your life.
This means that you put things on pedestals hoping that they will ‘save’ you from all of the effects of being fragmentation.
It might be money, relationships, sex, shopping, productivity, spirituality, success – it can literally be anything.
Whatever it is, you end up turn “good” things into “the ultimate thing”, expecting them to ‘fix’ you, complete you, and erase your suffering.
They can’t, though – they were never meant to.
Nothing in the world was meant to ‘save’ you and so no substitute can ever close the Void because only truth can.
Unicornitis is the addiction to escape from fragmentation rather than the integration of it but flow is the return to wholeness and the dissolution of the Void once and for all.
Building Flow as Real Life, Not Just Moments
Most people wait for flow to show up randomly – maybe with a nice walk, a chance sunset, or an unexpected creative streak.
But the vital truth is that to sustain flow, you must build it.
Flow is a muscle – not a miracle – and so you can actively start to build flow by consistently stretching just beyond the edge of ego, beyond complacency, but not so far that your life becomes chaos.
This is what we can call the sweet spot:
- Not the comfort zone (stagnation)
- Not the panic zone (overwhelm)
- But the STRETCH zone (REALNESS).
In this space, you actually merge with life rather than attempting to control it:
You stretch, but you don’t break, as you work with reality rather than forcing it and consistently receive feedback, learn, adjust, and continue down the path into more realness.
The Void might sometimes allow you to have small, ‘lucky‘ bursts of flow but building flow means you make it your default state overall.
If you want to go deeper into building flow and overcoming the Void then read my book Trust: A Manual in Becoming the Void, Building Flow, and Finding Peace.
Three Pillars for Sustaining The Flow State
1. Foundational Health Habits
Flow cannot be sustained in a body that is inflamed, dysregulated, sleep-deprived, undernourished, sedentary, and chronically over-stimulated and so consistent flow requires regulation, vitality, and presence.
The basics might be boring but they matter:
- Regular movement
- Sleep that restores rather than sedates
- Nutrition that stabilises rather than fills your system with processed junk
- Breathwork that anchors you back into the body
- Time in nature instead of doom scrolling)
- Digital boundaries and detoxification
These aren’t lifestyle trends – they’re conditions for resilience, energy, and for consciousness to flow without interruption.
A regulated nervous system is what allows truth to express itself without ego interference as you keep growing through the illusory certainty of the Void and into the uncertainty of flow.
2. Awareness, Acceptance, and Action
This is the pathway that I design my coaching containers around when working with clients:
- Awareness (Deconstruct the ego): See the character for what it is by naming the illusion and learning to observe the Void mechanisms in real time.
- Acceptance (Integrate the shadow): Allow everything in you that was exiled, shamed, denied, or ignored to come home without judgement.
- Action (Trust): Trust yourself and life as you act from wholeness rather than fragmentation so you can move with life instead of against it.
This cycle builds flow because flow is simply unblocked truth.
Every time you move through these stages, you free another layer of yourself from performance and return it to presence in yourself and life.
3. Vision, Goals, and Habits That Stretch You
Flow requires the stretch.
Not punishment, overwhelm, or collapse.
Stretch.
When you align with a real vision – one that calls you deeper into life rather than deeper into ego – then you naturally inhabit the stretch zone because you step beyond the edge of your ego (which takes you beyond the Void and the character you play within it).
Goals then become expressive of something real over ego.
Habits become reinforcing rather than compensatory.
Momentum becomes organic rather than forced and exhausting.
Vision brings direction, stretch brings life, and flow brings realness.
The Final Word: When Flow the Flow State Becomes Effortless
At first, building flow feels like ‘work’ because the Void will resist your desire to flow again and so your ego will panic:
This resistance is not a sign you are failing but that you are exiting the dreamworld so stay with it.
Once momentum is established, flow stops being something you chase and becomes something you live but this can only happen if you start to lean into reality instead of away from it.
Flow is not the exception -it’s the way you’re designed to be:
You were never built for fragmentation, pretending, performing, or living in a state of disconnection from truth – you were built to merge with life, to grow with it, to be stretched by it, and to become more whole through its interplay.
Flow is the reality you return to when you stop abandoning yourself because flow is realness and anything is is the dream.
Stay real out there,
P.S. If you’re ready to step up into the Stretch Zone so you can start building flow then book a free coaching session with me and I’ll help you shift gear and keep you accountable.
Trust: A Manual for Becoming the Void, Building Flow, and Finding Peace is a book about learning to return to your realness by cultivating trust in yourself and trust in life.
It contains practical exercises and dedicated meditations (Transformational Bridges) to take you DEEP in knowing yourself and life.
This book will answer many of the questions you have growing REAL and flowing towards wholeness. It covers everything from shame to addiction to the unconscious mind and synchronicity (and way more).
Personal Revolutions: A Short Course in Realness is a book designed to help you look at your life from the inside-out so that you can stop holding yourself back and go get what you really want.
It contains 166 practical ‘Revolutions’ for awareness and over 8,000 Self-Guidance Questions for you to uncover new insight about yourself, the world, and reality that you can translate into action and start building your real life on the realest possible foundation.
Shadow Life is an exploration of the human shadow and the hidden side of our personalities. It looks at the masks we wear, where these masks come from, and how we can take them off.
The book explores how we can better manage our relationships with shame, guilt, and trauma in order to remove the Mask that the world has asked us to wear (and that we forgot we were wearing) so we can live an authentic life with less drama, chaos, or BS whilst we’re still around.
The Flow Builder Journal has everything you need to make the next 21-weeks of your life a turning point.
It has monthly, weekly, and daily (morning and evening) check-ins, tools and reflections to keep you in the zone and keep you flowing with zest and momentum.
If you want to get unstuck and grow REAL then check it out.
Download EGO/SHADOW/TRUST - a free guide to transformation that will walk you through the vital stages of Awareness, Acceptance, and Action with practical strategies to implement right away.
Join the 7-Day Bare Ass Minimum (BAM) Challenge and start to implement foundational health habits and a powerful life vision only a week from now.
