There is a small ritual I repeat every time I step down from a stage. It happens after a keynote, and it used to happen even more often when I walked off with a guitar still vibrating in my hands.
I search for one of my friends (or from one of the organizers and her crew), and ask one simple question. “How was it?”. If I am in Italy, I usually add a very local nuance. “Girava bene?” The literal translation would be something like: “Did it spin well?“
You can imagine the reason. I care about feedback, almost obsessively. I want to understand what worked, what didn’t, where I can improve. It is a form of curiosity, mixed with craft, mixed with a healthy dose of insecurity that I have learned not to judge too harshly.
But that is only part of the story.
There is something deeper that happens in those moments. Something subtle, difficult to put into words. A space where the desire to know meets the impossibility of knowing entirely. A space where technique, presence, and intuition sit together. That space has a name. Mushin. 無心. It exists in Chinese culture as well, most commonly as Wuxin, but I learned the Japanese version first, and that is how it stayed with me.
Mushin comes from the world and the philosophy of the samurai, and it literally means “no mind”. Not the absence of thought, but the absence of interference. The warrior acts without hesitation because the mind is clear, unburdened, available. Fully present, completely free. Mushin describes a state in which the mind is here, but not sticky. The mind that sees, receives, reacts, but does not cling. No overthinking. No noise. You move with what is in front of you, without carrying the weight of what came before or what might come after.
It is paradoxical to explain. When you are in it, you notice everything. The audience. The breath in the room. The rhythm of the slides. The tiny shifts in energy that tell you where to go next. Even more paradoxically, you manage and navigate uncertainties (because onstage there are always uncertainties…) with a sense of calm improvisation. And yet, while you are entirely inside the moment, you are also strangely outside of yourself. As if someone else were piloting the experience, and you were simply witnessing.
Most of the time, this happens only when I am onstage, not when I am lecturing or running workshops. And probably that is one of the reasons why I love being onstage so much. I tend to say there are two kind of people: the ones who are terrified of going onstage, and the ones who can’t wait. I belong to the second group.
When I speak about mushin, people sometimes ask whether it is the same as flow, the concept developed by Csikszentmihalyi.
Not exactly. Don’t get me wrong. I love being in flow. And I love it so it became a North Star of my daily working and not-so working practices (hard to achieve it, by the way…). I also lectured about it and wrote an article on the topic it a few years ago.
Flow is when you enjoy something so much that you lose the perception of time and space. It is a beautiful state, almost addictive, and most of us have tasted it at least once.
Mushin, however, is different. It is lighter. Quieter. Flow comes from being carried by what you like, what you’re challenged by, or even better, love. Mushin comes from presence, from being carried by what is.
Flow can be unlocked through passion, skills, and the right level of challenge. Mushin appears when you stop trying to unlock anything at all.
Maybe this is why, after every lecture or performance, I ask how it went. Not because I cannot feel it. But because when mushin arrives, I am not quite “there” in the usual sense. I am both the actor and the observer, the speaker and the listener, the musician and the silent ear.
The question is not just about feedback.
It is my way of returning to myself.
