Mindflow: A class for life’s challenges
Where did Mindflow come from?
Laura and I were introduced to meditation, yoga, qi gong, and breathing techniques as youngsters under the guidance of our dad. We didn’t understand how powerful these tools were until much later in our lives. I remember sitting in meditation at about age 12 not understanding why I needed to still my mind! I hadn’t yet developed the ‘monkey mind’ of worries, fears, lists, and responsibilities that seem to come with being a grown-up.
Now, in our mid 30’s, we can admit we are grown-ups with families, an ever-evolving business, financial stresses, health scares, love and loss, and all the rest. We are quite familiar with the monkey mind! But our training and experience has helped us to form a cozy place inside ourselves, where we can get still, calm and clear, even when the world around us seems to be falling apart.
Moving our bodies, breathing, and turning inward has helped us through physical and emotional pain, heartache, loss, grief, childbirth, uncertainty, anxiety, depression, scary diagnoses, and day-to-day stresses. Through life’s stumbling blocks, these tools have supported us. We watched these tools support our mother through her diagnosis, her 2-year health journey with pancreatic cancer, and her final weeks. We have watched these tools cure our dad’s chronic back pain, aid him through impossible business decisions and keep him moving with one foot in front of the other in the face of his life’s hurdles.
The tools of Mindflow
As teachers who are also students of life, we want to share what has worked for us and what we are still learning. Mindflow is a series of classes we have designed to help support you through life's challenges. Each class combines the three powerful tools of meditation, breathwork, and movement, offering space for deep healing and introspection while guiding you to explore uncomfortable feelings like grief, uncertainty, and fear.
This collection was born out of the breaking points in our own lives - moments where we realized we could lean on all of these tools, in combination, as a way to stop resisting our feelings and rebalance our physical and emotional states.
We’ve designed the series to be a useful and sustainable go-to tool for anyone who’s feeling stuck or in a tough place. Each class is under 30 minutes so it can work its way into your day or your week and you can use it as much as you need. We work through tough feelings in two ways:
On a physical level, we use vigorous movement, steady movement, deep stretching, and self-massage techniques to release tension and tightness in the body.
On an emotional level, we use breathing techniques and meditation to cultivate deeper self-awareness.
Why it works
Science and the traditional medicine practices of China and India show that our emotions can affect specific body parts and/or body functions. Our physiology, emotions, and thoughts are all linked together. In our own experiences, we have learned that the deepest healing happens when we use a holistic approach. When we combine movement, like yoga, qi gong, and self-massage with deep breathing and focused meditation practices we connect to ourselves on many levels. We can access the root of a feeling or state of being. These practices are healing as individual tools, but when used together they can be transformative.
Moving your body can effectively release physical tension, tightness, and resistance and connect you to your body and the ground on a visceral level. In our day-to-day life, we can become so disconnected from our bodies. Laura and I are really pulling on all of our knowledge of the body and using the traditional movement expressions of Qi Gong and Yoga to open up the spaces that feel tight, tense, stuck, or even in pain.
Breathing deeply is one of the fastest and easiest ways to relieve stress, pain, anxiety, and even shift your mood. Deep breathing calms the nervous system, brings more oxygen into the cells of the body, lowers blood pressure, and balances stress hormones. When we change our breathing pattern from a shallow chest breath to a deeper belly breath we relieve anxiety and stress. Specific breath techniques can also help to release emotion, focus our minds and rebalance our energy systems.
Meditation is the practice of training our attention to achieve mental clarity and emotional calm. We use meditation to simply become more aware of what we are feeling and thinking in the present moment. This practice over time will cultivate deep self-awareness, and help to bolster our sense of self-worth as we come to know and ultimately love ourselves. The meditations we have created are specific to the emotional state we are working through in a class. They will help you explore new possibilities when you are feeling stuck and teach you how to offer yourself love, compassion, and a safe space to freely express what it is you are moving through.
Breathwork, meditation, and movement are essentially free practices accessible to anyone. However; if you find that you need some guidance and support to get you started we offer our Mindflow video collection that combines these three powerful tools into one powerful class to help you navigate the path to healing and deeper self-awareness. Try it here free for 14 days.