Flowing with Spirit~Navigating Life’s Rapids

Flow. It sounds so easy doesn’t it–as images of sitting on an inflatable tube on a lazy river enter your head. The sun is out; the breeze is warm, as you float down an idyllic stream with not a care in the world. Just going with the flow.

But life’s rivers aren’t always calm and peaceful and not every day is a sunny summer day. What happens when the sky clouds over, it starts to rain, and the river has rapids? Or what happens when the breeze stops and you find yourself not in a river but a stagnant pond? What does flow look like then?

When we first learned about flow in context to the spiritual world, it was about how when you tune into spirit and follow your intuition, everything just flowed as if by “magic”. As we continued to explore our spiritual paths, we discovered moments where things were at a complete standstill, even though we had followed our intuition and connected to spirit. We thought–well, we must have missed something if we are out of the “flow”. 

But what if both ways flow? What if there are more ways to experience flow than just the dichotomy of stop and go?

Our experiences with flow over the decades have shown us that this simple on or off idea of flow doesn’t really work in real life application. Can flow be the idyllic day on a stream? Yes. Can you also find yourself completely stuck and “out of flow”? Yes, but flow can be a calm lake, a tinkling brook, a frozen pond, rapids in a river, a stagnant swamp. 

Each of these at its essence is water. The water doesn’t cease to be just because it goes through external environmental changes. It adapts to what it needs to be to function and meet those external demands. It flows with its present moment and doesn’t judge itself or find itself lacking. It simply finds itself in a different stage then what it was before and knows that there is the possibility that it could change again into a familiar form or one completely new to itself.

And that is the real life application of flow. It’s meeting yourself where you are, in a state of non-judgement, responding to what life throws at you, knowing you’re doing the best you can with the tools you have at the moment. 

There’s something so powerful about acknowledging the present moment. It’s where our true strength lies–giving ourselves the gift of grace while we work on changing our stage of flow. That’s when we truly step into the Strength card and embody the person calmly standing next to the lion, hand placed gently on its head, looking out into the future with an inner surety that they’ll be able to face and navigate whatever comes their way.

If you haven’t had a chance to tune into our most recent episode about flow and Strength, click here.