Rethinking your Vinyasa Yoga Flow 🤔

"Spend more time doing things that make you forget about the time.”

Flow yoga gets a bad rap (often by me 🫣) and some of it is deserved to be fair to Akram. Done lazily, it's just exercise to music. You flow from one shape to the next, from A to B, the teacher says something about your stored trauma and then you leave having sweated through your lululemons 🍋. That version of Flow disconnects you from yoga entirely, which is ironic given the name.

BUT I want to make a case for the name, because I don't think it's an accident.

In psychology there's a thing called the flow state. It was mapped out by a researcher called Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (don't worry about pronouncing it, nobody can). It's the state athletes, musicians and surgeons describe when they're completely absorbed in what they're doing. Time goes strange and the monkey mind slows down 🐒. You stop deciding what to do next and just find yourself just doing it - it just sort of flows. Effortless effort, which is a phrase that could have come straight out of the Tao.

Here's the part that gets me. When you read how the flow (the psychological one) is actually described, it maps almost exactly onto a good Flow class. As I discovered in my last class with Laura 🫶🏽.

So how did it feel? 😵‍💫

Well just like the Flow state, the flow class began to feel like a kind of 'effortless effort.' I felt like I (along with the rest of the class) was being propelled through the poses (and time). Despite the demand, I was able to remain comfortable with being uncomfortable. For the 1st time, the Flow felt 'flowy.' I felt moments of rapt attention and total absorption, focused completely on the task at hand, so focused in fact that everything else around me just seemed to disappear. Time dilated, and the 90 mins felt like five minutes ⏰.

So the coincidence, if it even is one, is pretty useful. The moment you see Flow yoga through the lens of the psychological flow state, it stops being exercise to music and goes back to being yoga.

You can think of the poses as just a doorway. And you know you've walked through it not because the class was hard, or because you nailed your crow, but because somewhere in the middle you became so absorbed that you completely forgot to check the clock.

And that's how we experience the here and now. Not dwelling on the past or thinking of the future, but feeling so lost in the flow that you forget completely about time ✨

“Flow is a natural way of accessing your Best Selfand a greater positive energy that is always available - regardless of your culture, experience, educational background, or life story.”- Laurie E. Smith

Namaskar

Zahir

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