I Will Not Leap Onto a Rudderless Raft
     I was in a conversation last week when the word ‘Flow’ was uttered as part of the topic at hand.
     The word ‘Flow’ is used a lot in many areas of my life.
     I relax and go with it, and I don’t expend a lot of effort in trying to change ‘what is’. I am, therefore, no stranger to labels like ‘laid-back’ and ‘easy-going’.
     ‘Flow’ is also used to describe a condition that I usually refer to as ‘alignment’. Except there are differences between the two: subtle and ever so important. Alignment is a place of comfort inside life. It is the direction forward, filled with certainty that the next step is the correct step. In alignment there is Spiritual security.  Moving into Alignment is the journey of life.
     Over the years I have attended guided meditations and visualizations where I was invited to feel myself Flowing within the river of Life and Time.
     I was instructed to feel myself drifting, happily, upheld by the nurturing waters of stream, or being joyfully swept along in a great rushing torrent.
     My willingness to not struggle against the current was deemed to mark a  success. Certainly this surrender is a valuable lesson in the journey to being in the Here and Now: to accepting What Is.
     Today, in 2013, I find I am rejecting the concept that tubing down the waters of life is an appropriate description of Flow.
    It is a physical truth that moving water always arrives at the sea. The sessions where I was visualizing myself as a bobbing leaf, allowing Flow to direct me, sometimes continued to that point. At the river delta I was invited to feel the welcome of the Great Salt Mother Ocean and surrender to her embrace.
     It was lovely enough, as far as it went, and it served me well at that time. As the years go by, resistance has now joined me in that embrace. I don’t believe, and cannot imagine, that Flow ends or dissipates.
     I have no desire to feel myself diluted in something as massive as all the Pacific waters.
     It seems to me that when any energy, including my imagination, arrives at the sea, it would simply move into the next phase of the Flow. Entering a new dimension, the Flow of water moves from stream to river to ocean to cloud.
      When I meditate on Flow, I travel to the skies. I scud about on moonlit nights; I block the sun; I shed from myself into ploughed fields and forests and jungles and meadows. I can Flow and get slow on frozen peaks and glaciers. I can create mini-cycles and fall -- and evaporate -- over a desert, or return to the surface of the ocean far from land.
     While I am in the Flow I am part of the cycle, I move with the rotation of the planet, and I am carried in the movements within the atmosphere. I can glide on updrafts, and watch prey birds soar. 
     When I succumb to gravity and come plummeting back into the surface cycle, I can choose to tour through the cells of a tree or tiger or a spider or someone like me.
     Flow never stops and never disappears. It is not created or destroyed. It flows on; returning, eventually, to the start. New beginnings offer fresh chances which include all the changes wrought by experience.
     In the conversation that started this musing, I was offered a profoundly different vision of Flow. The person with whom I was speaking felt a need to commit to a direction. From a start in the hub of a great wheel, there was a requirement to travel in one direction: to forge ahead on a single spoke and to forego any other possibility. I found it rather a bleak view: faced with this choice, I think I would sit on the hub and go nowhere.
     Accepting such an unbending vision is like agreeing to leap onto a rudderless raft and be buffeted down a wide and rushing river. Nowhere to regain the bank; no eddies in the reeds to rest and reflect. It would be out-of-control: an unrestrained white-knuckle trip into circumstance.
      I cannot accept that Living in the Flow is like that. Flow is not a hundred miles of broad river rushing ever onwards with an agenda of its own, Flow is what my blood does as it responds to each contraction of my heart. Flow is how each breath I take in changes and renews me before flowing back out.
     Flow is the natural cycle: the wheeling sun and moon; the growing and resting of the living layer of Mother Earth. Flow is the Mobius figure, concluding at origin.
     Certainly Flow means releasing resistance and accepting What Is. It is also a tiny step into an accommodating cycle. Flow returns me from each foray to an additional place of decision. Every morning I can choose. Every moment I can choose. When I release the struggle and Go With he Flow that is when I am Moving into Alignment.
     Inspired Alignment https://www.facebook.com/groups/InspiredAlignment/ is a delicious initiative. Tamlyn Hill, founder of the 3D-Lifeprint program and I are hosting inspirational opportunities each day.
Upcoming presenters include Alicia Power with information on “How Spirit Guides Mentor Your Empowerment”; Bernadette Wagner on Being Present; and Laura Anne Harris on Striving for the Balance
Be sure to join the conversation at https://www.facebook.com/groups/InspiredAlignment/ 

     Jo Leath has been practicing Numerology and many other modalities for three decades.
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