A Quick Route From Stress to Flow

I’ve been feeling inspired by various conversations with clients lately (as well as, yes, my dog Theo) to share a quick embodied route from stress and anxiety into flow.

While changing our deeper embodied patterns may take a bit more patience and time, sometimes we need to get out of mental spiral or a distressed energy NOW, and here's an approach that often works:

Get Interested.

Get interested in what's around you.

Simple things, like: a color, a shape, the touch of something you can hold, a sound.

Allow yourself to follow a river of interest until something starts to shift inside you.

This is more than just distraction. Feelings are movement, and the emotions that catching a ride on that mental spiral? They are movement within you. When you use your senses to activate interest, a new kind of movement and nervous system expression begins to flow. The shape of your attention starts to change.

Even if some anxiety or distress is still present, and even if it keeps drawing you back, the movement of interest can offer you a different kind of wave to catch that can offer some respite and embodied relief.

In the photos above, Theo is demonstrating interest through smell (which, by the way is central to the biological expression of the interest affect in humans too, but that's a whole other lesson). What's more, he's showing how following his interest led him in a very different direction than either of us expected on our morning walk. He followed his nose farther and farther up this tree base, and it felt like he might climb all the way up the trunk if he could!

Follow your nose, your eyes, your touch, your ears, and even your intellect towards what brings you a sense of curiosity – even for a moment, or many moments in a row. The energy of interest might start to give you a more supportive ground to walk on.

To your river of interest…

Lee