2025 Reflections: Musical Flow, Carl Jung, & Being Skeptical of Skepticism (#41)

About this episode

In this episode, reflections on music, psychological flow, and artistic inspiration are explored through a stream of consciousness format.

This episode is another attempt to keep the podcast on life support. Like last year, our busy musician schedules (and lack of proper planning) made it difficult to publish several episodes throughout the year. With a few free days left in 2025 before some traveling, I gathered my thoughts and reflections from the year 2025 and tried to make them into this stream of consciousness style of episode. The first topic I talked about was my musical reflections from the year, with one of the primary ones being my thoughts about how psychological flow works, aka, that "being in the zone" feeling. I reflected on the following quote, which I love: “Flow is found at the intersection of discipline and surrender” On the theme of surrender, I also explored the topic of duende, a concept my wife Yankı read about in the Edward Hirsch book linked below on artistic inspiration. Duende introduces a mischievous, mysterious, and almost demonic force behind artistry. A quote referenced in this book is another one that stuck with me in my performances this past year: “All truly profound art requires its creator to abandon himself to certain powers which he invokes but cannot altogether control.” —ANDRÉ…

People in this episode

Host: Exploring Kodawari

Topics covered

• musical reflections
• psychological flow
• duende
• Carl Jung
• artistic inspiration

Keywords

• musical flow
• psychological flow
• duende
• Carl Jung
• artistic inspiration
• 2025 reflections

Mentioned in this episode

Books & works: GOYA