In the Flow vs. In the Groove

The first pillar of The Way is acceptance of what is, not resisting what happens to you or what other people say or do. It’s realizing that whatever happens at any moment is exactly as it’s meant to be for your growth and evolution and that of everyone else. To use an analogy, it’s like swimming with the current instead of against it. If you’re ever caught in a riptide, don’t struggle against it. Save your breath and energy. Instead of frantically clawing at the sand and trying to swim toward the shore, let go and let the current carry you out to sea. Then swim parallel to the shore till you’re out of the riptide zone. In other words, go with the flow.

When you go with the flow and live in harmony with the universe, you’ll notice synchronicities and signs, sometime even physical signs like billboards, telling you what direction you should go. Thus, going with the flow doesn’t mean blindly swimming or passively floating toward rapids and waterfalls, to use another analogy. You’ll come to decision points in the river of life where you’ll be faced with one or more distributaries and you won’t know what lies beyond the bend for any of them. Should I go to this college or that one? Should I major in psychology or geology? Should I break up with someone or stay? Should I have children or a career? Should I continue working or retire? We all face importance decisions at these forks in the river. Which distributary should we swim down? Will we face a waterfall if we take the left distributary? Will we get bogged down in boredom if we take the safe, slow-flowing right distributary? The Universe will show us which direction to take if we’re present and receptive. If we’re focused on past mistakes, what we want now, or future dangers or possibilities, we won’t pick up on the subtle and sometimes not-so-subtle clues the universe will send us.

Sometimes, clues come in the form of dreams. One night, I dreamt of undergoing an initiation with a woman who was a coworker in a spiritual community I belonged to. The symbolism of the dream meant that I had to prepare for marriage by going through several steps. I thought that maybe I should marry the woman, but I realized that she was only an embodiment of my anima, which, in my dream, is the feminine aspect of myself. I decided to journal every day, addressing my entries to my anima. In the course of journaling for over two months, I received more clues from the universe, found deeper meanings in the symbolism of the initial dream and other dreams, and made some significant discoveries about myself in terms of why I hadn’t gotten married in 42 years. Soon after I had finished journaling, I received very clear directions from my transit and relocation astrology that I would meet my intended mate on September 22, 1991 in Bozeman, Montana. So, I went with the flow, taking the left distributary, leaving the spiritual community and moving to Bozeman, where, on the evening of September 22, I met my current wife, asked her out, and three months later, married her. I suppose you could say that the distributary led to rapids, but they soon calmed down and married life has been smooth sailing ever since.

One of the things I realized in my journaling and self-reflection was that I was stuck in negative thinking and feelings about marriage, partly due to my parents’ difficult divorce. Bad experiences with women reinforced these negative thoughts and feelings so that they played over and over again in my mind like a broken record stuck in a groove. Some might think the expression “being in the groove” is synonymous with “being in the flow.” It’s used in describing someone who consistently performs well. However, most people get into negative grooves called bad habits in which they consistently do wrong or harm themselves. When you’re in a groove, it’s not easy to go anywhere other than where the groove or rut takes you. In terms of neuroscience, your brain is wired to think, feel, and act (or not act) in only one way. To get out of the rut, you need to rewire by clearing every day. In my case, I didn’t know how to rewire, but my journaling and self-reflection, getting to the root causes of my fear of marriage and replacing it with a positive attitude, was a form of rewiring that enabled me to break out of the groove and go with the flow.