Generosity + Flow
“If there is free flow, there is no pain; if there is pain, there is lack of free flow.”
At a workshop a handful of years ago, I remember hearing Eutimia Cruz Montoya, a brilliant local healer, Chinese medicine practitioner, and teacher say something like, "Movement = Life. Where things flow, there is life; where things stagnate, there is death."
As the post I quote above reiterates, the principle of "flow" in Chinese medicine is about the flow of blood and Qi, thought of as our "life force.”
For months now, I've collected little resonances of this idea, picking up breadcrumbs here and there across various texts and interviews, piecing together a possible answer to the question:
Where all does this principle apply?
My brain constantly attempts to spot patterns between “domains,” always looking to understand what an insight in one arena might reveal to us in another. I think what I'm trying to find is a core truth. After all, if something applies in many disciplines and practices, might it speak to a more profound proverb about life?
What I think I'm trying to do, too, though, is test the principle.
It's not that an ancient tradition like Chinese medicine needs my approval, of course. It’s valid whether I believe it or not. Though, if we’re being honest here, I’m a big fan.
Still, there’s a part of me that needs a spiritual tradition to hold up when applied to my lived experience. I’m guessing this inner requirement came from young adulthood when leaders suggested I distrust myself, ignore my own experience, and blindly believe any dogma, even if it directly contradicted my lived reality.
Given all of that, here are a few threads I’ve pulled together, which, taken in tandem, appear to confirm a deep truth underlying the principle, as I expected.
First, with water: "Stagnant" water can't find a way to drain properly, leaving it sitting in one place for days or weeks. As time goes on, the trapped water becomes a perfect breeding ground for bacteria, parasites, and mosquitos, which can then carry disease elsewhere. While not all life that thrives in stagnant water is "bad"—lotuses, for instance, prefer standing water—much that comes from stagnant water does produce death and disease. As always, there’s a delicate ecological balance between stagnation and flow. Case in point? Both natural and man-made dams.
Similarly, as Charles Eisenstein says in Sacred Economics, “Each organism in nature, each cell in the body, can handle only a certain volume of energy throughput. We are the same. Too much flow through a channel can burst the channel. Too big an accumulation is a tumor.”
Also, with creativity: Speaking of tumors, I’ve heard Brené Brown repeatedly remark that "Unused creativity is not benign; it metastasizes in our bodies." While this sounds metaphorical, I take Brené to mean it literally. Consider me fully convinced at this point that holding our creativity, not giving away what we are here to give, literally becomes sickness in the body. A lack of flow, kept guarded for too long, begins to make us physically, emotionally, and spiritually ill.
Then, there are relationships: No matter your preferred dating style, folks like Esther Perel speak to a paradoxical link between Intimacy and Distance. Check out this older Marginalian piece (formerly Brain Pickings) on Perel’s book, Mating in Captivity. In essence, holding our partners too tightly is a way of stagnating love: try to control or force love too firmly, and death begins to loom; hold your love(s) more loosely, engendering trust, and love can thrive.
Lastly, with money: In an interest-based economy, like capitalism, wealth is encouraged to accumulate. The more you have and keep, the more you make off of the interest. Some get richer, while the majority stay impoverished. But, it doesn’t have to be like this. Again, from Sacred Economics: “It’s only when high income translates into accumulation, frivolous consumption, or socially destructive consumption that it makes sense to restrict it. In other words, the problem is not with high income; it is with the results of the income getting stuck at some point in its circulation, accumulating, and stagnating.” Note the use of the word “circulation” here, too, concerning money. Is that not the word we use when speaking about our blood flow, as Chinese medicine alludes to?
Over and over again...
Stagnation = Death
Movement = Life
When I weave these similar strands together, a clear pattern emerges, and a few key themes come up for me.
Primarily, I see “stagnation” as a form of “greed.”
In which case, applying it to the examples above, your creativity is a type of stored “wealth.” So, not unleashing your gifts on the world is a type of greed. Meaning you are keeping what others might desperately need from them. Doing so not only makes you sick but might prevent someone else from being healed. Still, your withholding isn't because you're a "bad" person. After all, "Greed is a response to the perception of scarcity." That feeling of scarcity exists for a good reason. In my experience, though, giving when it seems like I can't is one of the fastest ways to break my perception of scarcity and create flow.
Stagnation is also a type of “control” or “forcing.”
I don’t know about you, but staying small, fearing the risk that comes with sharing whatever makes me come alive, is my little way of trying to remain in control. If I don’t try, then I can’t fail, can’t be criticized, can make sure I make a specific amount of money to survive, etc.
Like I’ve said in my previous writing, I also think this is a type of codependency, sacrificing my own needs to maintain order but allowing resentment and bitterness to build up in my body as I ignore what it keeps telling me.
If all of this is true, though, then the inverse is pretty exciting, right?
Loosening my grip on relationships, sharing what makes me come alive with the world, and giving my wealth and resources are all types of generosity.
It would follow, then, that the more wildly generous I become—the more flow I participate in—the more life I generate for myself and others, and the more Qi/life-force/energy I receive in return.
I know I keep saying this everywhere, but in around five-ish years of contemplating “aliveness,” it sure seems to me like the point of life is for us to create more life. And that the more we give out of our aliveness, the more life we generate for others, and ourselves, too.
It leaves me to conclude one thing:
Generosity is the path to my most alive life. And sharing my gifts, my resources, and what makes me come alive is the greatest gift I can offer.
Life, in fact, wants me to do so.
