Hi Everyone – I think I’ll leave the conversation on flow’s rise and fall here, with this Christmas blessing:

Winter’s Grace
Trusting the Light Within

The pathless path lies silent,
Not yours to claim or trace.
The choiceless choice is given,
A grace that leaves no trace.

Virgin birth within the spirit
A dawn no shadow can bind.
As Earth in winter slumbers,
Let your hidden light unwind.

Become the glass unclouded,
The mirror without a face.
Eyes that truly open,
Ears that deeply embrace.

Not seeking, yet surrender,
No grasp, no guarded view
Transparent to transcendence,
The Way is finding you.

To simplify: I may forget or remember, but I’m learning to trust compassion as the deeper Truth that keeps shaping us. For me, Unfolding Presence is becoming a kind of faith without doctrine, creating space were compassion reveals what’s ‘True‘ and free us from beliefs can trap us in pain.

Anita, if I’m hearing you correctly, ‘Flow’ takes shape for you right now through repetition and re‑evaluation, making sure realizations stay present in your awareness. That is what helps you move forward.

For me, with a shared anxiety of forgetting, I’m experimenting with something different, resting in a realization and trusting it without needing to revisit it. I hear this isn’t where you are at the moment, and that’s perfectly okay.

I wonder if I should use a different word than Flow to describe it. Maybe Unfolding or Presence fits better?

What I hold for you, and for myself, is the possibility that, in time, the realizations we’ve touched, especially the sense of being enough, might feel so steady and trusted that they simply live in us without effort. Not as something to chase or reinforce, but as a quiet Truth that carries and shapes us.

Perhaps part of the journey is learning how to live with the fear of forgetting and finding ways to let truth stay alive without needing to grasp it so tightly. And Flow, whatever word we use for it, is a something being discovered, each in our own rhythm, connected in the movement toward living more freely.

Anita, no need for apologies. I really appreciate your reflections and how you connect them to your lived experience. What strikes me, though, is that sometimes the analysis seems to keep you-us circling in the past rather than moving forward. I recognize that may be a projection of a pattern I notice in myself.

Something I’ve been working on is learning to trust the realizations that come and creating space for them to shape me… a step I see missing in some of my older posts. It’s not easy, because the pull of old patterns and familiar thoughts is strong, especially with my tendency to overthink. Yet I’m learning that when I lean into one insight and live from it, even briefly, it opens up space for movement and flow.

I wonder what it might feel like for you to pick one of your own realization, maybe about goodness, or about love arising when we stop forcing, and simply rest in it, trusting it as truth that doesn’t need reinforcing with analysis or justification. Perhaps that could be a way to step into the freedom you already glimpse.

This, to me, is how I imagine Flow.. much like the Tao, moving not by effort but by trust in what already is.

Hi Anita
I loved the parables. It always amazes me when something simple opens a doorway beyond the words, revealing something quieter underneath.

If you look back at my earliest post here years ago, you might wonder at the amount of time… Part of it, I think, is that the self quietly turned “letting go” into another practice to accomplish. Even “embodying” can become that, can’t it? Another thing to do, another way to try to get it right. What I’m seeing now is that the moment I try to embody, I’m already back in the old pattern, the self managing, adjusting, striving.

I use the word embodiment, but I have to hold it lightly, as neither noun nor verb — more like a softening into what’s already here. Not a technique, not a project, not a spiritual skill to master. Maybe that’s why I kept circling. I was trying to practice what only reveals itself when the practicing stops. Still I only catch glimpses, out of the corner of my eye, for a breath or two.

As this softened, a reflection surfaced — a kind of echo:

The Way is and is not, yet from it all arise and return.
No path can reach the Path that is pathless.
Embodied, the path dissolves — the Tao present.

When the river is blocked, we carve channels called virtue. When the sky is hidden, we light lanterns called wisdom.
But the river was flowing before the channels, and the sky was shining before the lanterns.
Return to the source, and the lanterns are no longer needed.

We are born upon a path, and that too is Tao. Each step a seeking, each turn a question.
Yet as long as we walk, Tao seems hidden. The horizon recedes, the seeker remains restless.

The path is not the source, yet the path is not meaningless.
It is a shadow pointing toward the light, a rhythm leading to silence.
When the path dissolves, the illusion of separation fades, and what was sought is revealed as always present.

When the path dissolves, the shore appears. Looking back, the way we walked is illumined.
The self whispers, “I arrived by way of the path,” – even though the river does not arrive — it flows.

So, Tao pulls us back, again and again, until remembering becomes forgetting, and forgetting becomes remembering.
In that ebb and return, the Beloved smiles. The pathless path is walked, and the walker dissolves into the Way.

Hi Anita: I think you capture it nicely – now the question how do we move beyond the words?

What follows is today’s journal entry.

For a long time now, I’ve noticed myself circling the same inner terrain, returning to familiar thoughts, trying to name something I sensed but couldn’t quite articulate. Recently, these lines surfaced:

The Way is and is not, yet from it, all arise and return.
No path can reach the Path that is pathless…
Embodied, the path dissolves, the Tao… Presence.

This morning, something softened. A small shift, quiet, almost imperceptible, opened between the words letting go and embodiment. I saw how the former, for me, had quietly become a subtle form of striving and control.

There are moments on the path when a single word reveals the hidden architecture of our inner life. Today, while reading a CAC reflection on the dark night of the soul, such a moment arrived.

The dark night often comes first as loss. It feels as though something essential has slipped away: meaning, joy, certainty, the familiar sense of God. From within the experience, it is loss. It empties us. It unravels us. It asks us to walk without the lights we once trusted.

Yet as the night deepens, another truth begins to shimmer at the edges. What felt like loss reveals itself as the falling away of what could never truly hold us. The dark night appears as loss, but its essence is not loss at all.

We often speak of letting go in such seasons. The phrase feels gentle, almost compassionate… a soft surrender, a loosening of the grip. But even here, a subtle effort remains. A quiet belief that I am the one releasing, that surrender is something I must accomplish.

And so I found myself returning again and again to that night, until another movement appeared: embodiment.

Embodiment is not loss, and not letting go. It is the quiet dissolving of the one who believed there was something to lose. Here, nothing is taken. Nothing is released. Nothing is managed or performed. Belief no longer required, dissolves into something… Free.

What remains is presence, unforced, unguarded, whole.

The dark night may begin as loss and pass through the language of letting go, but embodiment is the gentle undoing of the one who thought anything needed to be surrendered. And in that undoing, a deeper presence emerges, simple, grounded, embodied.