When I think of transformative feelings and states of being, I am drawn to the flow state. As hoopers and flow artists, we tend to associate flow with movement, those moments when time disappears and we become fully immersed in motion.
Lately, I have been reminded that the flow state isn’t just something we access through movement — it can also be found in stillness, especially in nature. Our experiences in nature open us up to awe, which is intimately connected to flow.
This week I am curious about the connection between the feelings of awe and flow, and how they both can be accessed through a connection to nature. While musing on awe, I was reminded of authors like John Muir and Ralph Waldo Emerson, and their deep, reverent connections to the earth:
“We are now in the mountains and they are in us [...] our flesh-and-bone tabernacle seems transparent as glass to the beauty around us, as if truly inseparable from it [...] a part of all nature, neither old nor young, sick nor well, but immortal…” John Muir
“[In the woods,] all mean egotism vanishes. I become a transparent eyeball; I am nothing; I see all …” Ralph Waldo Emerson
What stands out to me in these words is their timeless sense of surrender — of becoming part of something greater. It mirrors the sensations I associate with the flow state: selflessness, full-body awareness, connection with all, and a holistic reverence for everything in existence.
Muir and Emerson’s descriptions of their experiences in nature remind me how the flow state is a unique, immersive experience of awe. Awe is an emotion that can be felt anywhere in the body. The flow state is a mind-body experience that can sometimes cause a deeply transcendent, and meditative space.
Even 18th-century thinkers like Edmund Burke wrote about awe as a response to the vast and mysterious. He believed awe often arises from obscurity — those things we can’t quite grasp, but that move us nonetheless. That insight reminds me of the relationship between challenge and flow: we don’t reach these states when things are too easy. We need mystery, effort, or just enough resistance to stay fully engaged.
In that way, awe and flow both ask the same thing of us: presence.
All of these musings bring me to a simple invitation:
Get outside and flow in nature.
How might awe deepen your flow state?
Let your curiosity guide you. Go outside and find out.
Written by: Shae Nance