Why Does Nothing Seem to Flow Anymore?

Let's start with the word itself.

At its root, to flow simply means "to swim", to move in a specific direction across the waters.

So when we talk about flowing in life we don't mean floating around being led by circumstances, but actively being the life force that moves things around you.

This has two dimensions:

Both are expressions of the same underlying thing: abundant, regenerative & vibrant life.

And right now, for a lot of people, both aren't necessarily flowing like that.

Ok, how can we claim this though?

You don't need to be a top psychologist, a healthcare professional or researcher to read the room. Something is clearly up.

In the US workforce, nearly 3 in 4 adults are barely keeping their heads above water. 

And that's just work stress. We haven't even started accounting for the other dimensions: loneliness, chronic fatigue, inflammation, economic pressure, environmental anxiety.

That quiet sense that the world is moving too fast and you're somehow falling behind it? Yeah, we're feeling it all across the board. 

The data confirms what most of us already feel in our bodies. We are not flowing. We are managing.

There's a difference.
We're surviving on borrowed energy and calling it "living".

Let's talk about stagnation

Imagine one day you wake up to the news that all of the rivers in the world suddenly stopped flowing.

What would happen?

Chaos would slowly ensue, because we depend on water moving. Stagnation doesn't just bring scarcity across the landscape. It prevents minerals and nutrients from being transported. It kills biodiversity. It creates exactly the conditions in which disease takes hold and thrives.

The same mechanism applies to the microcosm of our bodies:

• Stagnation in the body shows up as fatigue. 
• Stagnation in the mind shows up as brain fog. 
• Stagnation in the soul shows up as depression. 

Stagnation is the most important alarm signal our bodies can give us. It is the body saying something is blocked, something is depleted, something really needs to move.

The real problem is that these signals have become so common we've started treating them as as annoying human inconveniences that we can simply shut off.

We medicate them, push through them, but rarely ask what they're actually pointing to.

Enter Traditional Chinese Medicine

TCM practitioners have operated under very simple frameworks for a long, long time. They've observed that the patterns we see in nature somehow emerge in the human body. 

The Chinese word for element is Xing 行. Which means to walk. To move.

This tells you everything about how TCM sees the world and the body:

༄  Health [Flow] is what happens when that motion is in harmony.
֎  Disease [Stagnation] is what happens when it isn't.

At the heart of this ancient practice lies a simple but profound idea: all of nature is governed by five fundamental qualities of energy. Not elements in the western sense of fixed building blocks, but phases. Movements. Ongoing energetic processes.

The five phases are:

(This is a whole framework in itself and we plan to do a full breakdown with some permaculture correlations soon. For now, this is a good reference to start)

What the elements can tell us about our flow

This framework in TCM sees no real distinction between the nature of seasons, the climate, and the cycles taking place in the human body. The same laws that govern a plant moving from growth to flowering to harvest to decline and storing, govern us too.

Which means: what disrupts the seasons, disrupts the body. And what disrupts the body, shows up in the seasons of your life: 

Tell us you're not dealing with at least one of these. 

Most of us are dealing with all five, in some degree or another. So... what is there to do about them? 

The thing is: You can't force flow

Any artist will tell you this. You can't sit down and decide to be in flow. You can only create the conditions for it.

Restoration follows a sequence. Not necessarily in this exact order, but these four components all need to be present:

■ REMOVE THE BLOCKS

This is the obvious one but it's where most people skip to last. Good sleep. Real hydration. Rest that isn't just collapse. Emotional hygiene, which means actually processing what's moving through you rather than pushing it down.

You clear the channels before you try to fill them.

᪤ GET THE ENERGY MOVING

Before nourishment can be absorbed, energy needs to flow. A body that isn't moving, physically, emotionally, energetically, cannot receive what you give it. Breathwork, Qi cultivation practices like Tai Chi or Qigong or just movement in general. Even walking outside without your phone. 

The point is to start the circulation before you try to rebuild.

❈ REBUILD DEPLETED RESERVES

This is where nourishment comes in. Eating what your body actually recognizes as real food, in the forms it can absorb and use. Nutrient density, bioavailability, ingredients that come from whole sources.

This is how we slowly rebuild what has been depleted over time.

✦ REPEAT + MANTAIN

Flow is not a goal you can tick off of your to do list. It's a relationship you have with your own body, your own life. You have to keep the blocks at bay: resting well, sleeping properly, tending to your emotional world, staying connected to nature, eating food that actually nourishes you. Consistently and in full presence.

This rhythm happens at every level of human experience. 

And it's something we return to again and again, not because we ever really fail, but because we're alive and life is always moving, ever expanding and contracting.

What's next?

This blog is part one of two we wrote to introduce our Back in Flow giveaway.

Next week we go deeper into what nourishment actually means at every level and why it might be the most complete antidote to everything we've talked about here.

To enter the giveaway make sure to like this post, follow us on Instagram and fill in the form linked below. We gotta get people to try Terraviva somehow.

Stick around to read next week's issue and sign up to our newsletter. In an era of AI generated content, we actually take the time to create these pieces from lived experience, TCM and permaculture studied principles.

Wishing you wellness,

— Natalia