If I could say one thing to new lovers, to those longing to be new lovers, to those recovering from having been lovers, it would be one word: flow. Buddhists might call it being in the moment, or following the breath, but these seem clinical and prescriptive. Flow is pretty simple. You know when you’re doing it and most of the time you’re not.
A pop term might be The Zone. Things are flowing into and out of you when you’re in The Zone. You attract the good. You’re lifted up by the help of everything around you. You give, and the giving is strong and powerful. It’s one of the greatest feelings. To get it, we have to relax into what poet Mary Oliver calls letting “the soft animal of your body love what it loves.”
The body, listened to with care, does not lie. It says yes, and it says no. Going with either can be flow. Listening tells you in an instant which it will be, right then. Flow is soft, it’s yielding, it’s lightning quick to change, impossible to stop. You can ignore it, you can be so cut off from flow that life marches along rigidly. That’s the hardest time to find flow because you are stuck in a repeating track.
If you’re forcing a relationship to work, that’s not flow. If you’re holding tight to resentments, not flow. If you’re controlling, demanding, giving too much. How does that feel? Stuck, stopped, jammed, grrr. Find flow. Let things move through you. Look, really look at the natural world. Something small, even a tuft of grass in cracked cement will do. Let the color green and the tenacity of that clump unlock your grasp. Laugh. And start fresh. Personally, I follow a dog’s butt through fields nearly every day. Talk about flow…
photo thanks to Paul McCurdie
A pop term might be The Zone. Things are flowing into and out of you when you’re in The Zone. You attract the good. You’re lifted up by the help of everything around you. You give, and the giving is strong and powerful. It’s one of the greatest feelings. To get it, we have to relax into what poet Mary Oliver calls letting “the soft animal of your body love what it loves.”
The body, listened to with care, does not lie. It says yes, and it says no. Going with either can be flow. Listening tells you in an instant which it will be, right then. Flow is soft, it’s yielding, it’s lightning quick to change, impossible to stop. You can ignore it, you can be so cut off from flow that life marches along rigidly. That’s the hardest time to find flow because you are stuck in a repeating track.
If you’re forcing a relationship to work, that’s not flow. If you’re holding tight to resentments, not flow. If you’re controlling, demanding, giving too much. How does that feel? Stuck, stopped, jammed, grrr. Find flow. Let things move through you. Look, really look at the natural world. Something small, even a tuft of grass in cracked cement will do. Let the color green and the tenacity of that clump unlock your grasp. Laugh. And start fresh. Personally, I follow a dog’s butt through fields nearly every day. Talk about flow…
photo thanks to Paul McCurdie
