Just ‘be’ in your Zone – experience magic!

If you can find a way to give your inner joy an expression, you will be perpetually in a state of bliss!

Find out what your Zone is. Live in that Zone, play in that Zone, work in that Zone, you will then forever be blissful. To me the Zone is when you forget you are alive, you lose yourself to whatever you are doing, you immerse yourself doing only what gives you joy! The Zone knows no time, the Zone remains detached from money, from reward, recognition and material benefits, and the Zone doesn’t tire you.

To be sure, each of us has a Zone that’s special to us. Someone may find their Zone, as in Zen, in chopping wood. Another may find her Zone in cooking. Someone else will find it in art, in music, in dance. Yet another person may just find the Zone in fishing. To each one his or her own Zone. There is no problem when we operate within our Zones. The problem arises when a person who loves theatre is working as a dispatcher in a logistics company. Or when a teacher has become a lathe operator. Or when a musician has become a lawyer. My former colleague, Bobby Ghosh, once, writing for TIME magazine, demystified the Zone. He was writing on Sachin Tendulkar: “When he goes out to bat, Tendulkar seeks ‘the Zone’. It’s a mental state familiar to great athletes in which the mind filters out the crowd, the opponents, the score and other distractions; performance (in sport) is guided by a magic combination of intuition and muscle memory. Tendulkar speaks of it in terms more spiritual than sporting: ‘I need to surrender myself to my natural instincts. My subconscious mind knows exactly what to do.’” But the concept of the Zone is not limited to sport alone. It applies to anything we do. This is what Osho, the Master, calls being in unison with the Universe. It is from this oneness that world-class performances and bliss ensue, perhaps not in the same order! Reading Ghosh’s quote, and knowing of Tendulkar’s deification, may well give anyone a complex that we__ you and I__are not cut out for such divinity. You may want to conclude that the Zone is the exclusive prevail of prodigies and geniuses. Wrong. It is because people perform in their Zones that they create work that gets celebrated that makes them all-time greats.

The idea is not to get into the Zone because you want to be great or be seen as great. The idea is far simpler. If you know your Zone and live in it, you will live in bliss. When you live in bliss, you will be able to give your joy expression with your craft in more ways than you can even fathom! As Osho would say, “‘IT’ happens. Something breaks down inside you, the barriers are lost, and you become one with the Universe. A great orgasm spreads all over your being, you are in tune with existence.”

So, find your Zone and ‘be’ in it. Just ‘be’. And watch, and experience, the magic happen!