How To Uncover the Flow From Your Childhood

A few weeks ago, I found myself lapsing into a low mood again. I use that phrase as a professional, trained to recognize the difference between a “lapse” and a “relapse.” A moment or short time of stepping back, and of falling back to square one again.

Being me, I tried to connect with my usual CBT tools, checked my caffeine levels, and made myself go outside a little more often. I have multiple degrees, years of experience, and am more self-aware than I need to be.

By the Wednesday, I had a group coaching call with my life coach, and asked for her viewpoint.

If you’re not familiar with Life Coaching, this is where I go when I feel stuck, like there’s something I just can’t see for myself, and ask them to check my blind-spots for me. Which my coach, Tiffany Han, is amazing at.

Having worked with her for a couple of years, she knows me well (and my common patterns) and gave me a mini pep talk about how I need to do something that isn’t about achievement or “just ticking a box.” But to do things for the joy of them… And wow did I need that reminder.

To summarise a long story, one of my key depressive symptoms is called “anhedonia” which means that, for me at least, all activities lose their sense of enjoyment or purpose.

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The Search Began

I began with Disney movies. As a teenager, these had been a staple reminder of the happy ending I wanted to believe in. Yet, even my favorites felt hollow.

I tried to show up to scrapbooking sessions again; to focus on sticking paper together and just picking colors to go together. But I hated everything I made.

I brain-dumped my head-space onto a piece of paper. And then got overwhelmed by the sheer amount of things.

Most importantly, though, I reached out for help in that Wednesday call. People in the community from that call suggested yoga, cross-stitch, journaling and things I already do. I had excuses for each new suggestion and although i tried a few, it was a half-hearted attempt and I knew it.

Tiffany’s Challenge for me was Simple (not easy)

For the next 5 days, don’t do those achievement-focused “tasks” and seek out the “frivolous” and the “pointless” activities. Basically do things in my spare time that don’t tick off a check-box.

Seek out the ridiculous if I need to. Hilariously, she even suggested drawing moustaches on pictures of the Prime Minister.

My husband doesn’t read his BMJ’s but I do… And scrapbook with the images.

By day 2 of “let’s try nightly Disney movies,” I recognised I didn’t want to, and downloaded a free “interior room designer” app to be creative without any practical sense of achievement tied in.

Setting up the expectation to not do things that give me “progress” for a few days had to wanting to write fiction again. So I tried that too; ignoring the ‘progress’ side and just trying to get back into story-crafting. Still, I didn’t feel even a spark of happiness.

And by the fourth evening I was driving myself crazy, and still feeling low.

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I Went Outside with my Phone and a Pair of Headphones

After a bit of angry dancing in sandals, and the headphone wire tangling itself up, I paused. I stepped inside to grab my hip-bag and my poi, and to leave the shoes indoors. I went back out into the grass in my socks, desperate to connect with something.

When I realized how much I dislike sports as a young adult, I took up Circus Skills. So what began as “I don’t know how to handle being in my body” became hours of pacing up and down the garden, trying to feel that -flow- state again.

I thought I would enjoy the feeling of my poi, but spent the time mostly hitting myself with the ends (I never was very good at it). After a very short time, found a good-sized garden cane from the set by the shed.

That was where I found myself again.

Pacing up and down the grass in my back garden, headphones in with a mix of electro-dance-emo music, switching between two basic staff spinning moves, I found my inner fire again.

For the first hour, I just let muscle memory guide me.
In the second hour, I looked up some basic moves to “refresh my memory” — at first failing some basic poi spins and feeling the literal dip in mood — but then abandoning the tools I’d bought for a cane (which got shorter after one particularly bad drop across my practise).

I tried to complete a fishtail move… and there was something about that movement, despite dropping it over and over again… It felt like I was drawn to just keep pushing; to pushing against the failures because I know the ‘flow’ the other side of it.

I was *in* the flow just by trying.

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Unlocking My History

I think I was around 11 or 12 when I began spinning garden canes in my parents’ garden — and I don’t mean just as a way to stop boredom. Looking back, this is also when my mental health symptoms first began.

I took a cane form my parent’s shed, found some old rubber caps in my dad’s toolbox for each end, and wrapped a feather necklace around the top to mark out the “handle” area.

It lived in my bedroom, and I would twirl it around my hands (handrolls, I now know they have an actual name) and not only is that, in hindsight, a clear sign of **something** in me drawn to that fluid movement, but I still have that cane.

It’s currently in the spare room upstairs, despite being a married woman in my thirties… I moved it to my flat when I left home, into the flat with my husband and now to our mortgaged home.

I’ve never even questioned it, yet I have carried that old stick around for over a decade. I maybe pick it up once a year to relive the nostalgia… but I’ve never even contemplated getting rid of it.

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Recognising the Flow

There is something in Staff Spinning that I have always known, but not followed since I was a child.

Even before my year of circus skills, I could already juggle, taught myself to unicycle, and began twirling devil sticks…

I am not planning to quit my job and go join the circus. I’m scared of heights, for one thing.

And even tonight I wonder if Staff Spinning is actually a hobby I should invest my time in, if the interest will fade, if I am expecting too much of it. I am considering if it’s too much of an ‘accomplishment-focused’ activity.

But I also know that part of my resistance is that 2 hours in my garden with a cane isn’t “productive” and that I want to get back to that fluid sense of flow — a separate desire to getting better at the staff techniques (although that would be cool too) but more focused on finding that flow.

I’m not saying I will now take up Staff Spinning, or pick up my circus skill tools again, but having been reminded of this flow-state from my childhood, I was able to seek it out again.

And this is what I mean when I speak about Rooted Reinvention. This is me, looking back to my roots, and after considering the evidence-based practise, the knowledge of my Masters, and instead of going back to that childhood version who following that innate human instinct that tells us what we’re really seeking.