The Dragontree

Have you ever had the experience of being “in the flow”? Where everything just seems to be showing up in your life at the right time and all of your goals are being reached effortlessly? Do you love it when that happens?  I do. I love it so much that I decided to try to figure out how to create that flow, or momentum, more and more in my life.  This little blog is a synopsis of what I discovered.

First I found that if I don’t keep my agreements,momentum just doesn’t happen.  In fact, I think it is impossible to get in the flow if we aren’t impeccable with our word.  To read more about keeping your agreements, read this BLOG.  Once you are managing your agreements consistently, it begins: the first glimpses of ease in creation appear.

Next, the way to fan those sparks of momentum into a bonfire of hot happenin’ effortless manifestation is to create a plan. When designing a plan, clarity is your best friend.  Your plan needs to have clear goals, steps, and dates.  Then you need to work the sh*t out of your plan – you need to move into action and get it done.

I am guessing that right now you are thinking, “If I have to work at my plan, then reaching my goals isn’t exactly effortless, now is it?”.  But, this is the magic part:  if you keep your agreements and make and work a plan toward a specific goal, your goals in all areas of your life start to just show up with ease.  Conflict melts away [I would probably not use the word “effort” here. You’re sort of admitting that it’s not truly effortless altogether {which is true – it’s not – and it would be absurd to expect it to be; there’s nothing wrong with work, and I’d question any proposed ideal for humans that involves not working – Sifu would definitely agree with this} but that the magic is in the way that OTHER parts of your life, beyond the particular tasks you’ve included in your plan, are beginning to click even though they weren’t an explicit focus of your efforts] and you start to experience positive change [“results” is maybe more linear than you are saying this process is – “positive change” or something equivalently broad might be better] at a very rapid pace.

Once you are in the flow and your momentum is unstoppable, surrender and be grateful, and keep keeping your agreements and continue to make and stick to clear plans. Yi Quan (“ee chwenn”), known as the “formless martial art” is something of a distillation of the internal principles of other martial arts, such as kung fu.  One of its central teachings is the simultaneous practice of song (relaxation) and gen (work).  It is not as paradoxical as it sounds.  My teacher, Sifu Fong, illustrated this with many examples.  If you are entirely focused on work while swimming, your body will be tense and you will sink; if you relax completely and don’t work at all, the same thing will happen.  But at the happy intersection of work and relaxation . . . ah, you stay afloat and you enjoy it.

Rather than dividing your life into periods of work and periods of relaxation, stay relaxed even while working hard!  Remember that work is not the same as tension.  There is magical wellspring of energy in the elusive balance of simultaneous work and relaxation.  Runners who learn to keep their heart rate and breathing as slow as a person sitting on a couch can get into a zone in which they achieve peak performance and endurance.  Martial artists learn that the more relaxed they are – even in the act of throwing a punch – the more power they can deliver.  The same is true in virtually all areas of life.

Get in the flow and find your power.

– Briana Borten, Founder of The Dragontree and Co-founder of Imbue Pain Relief Patch