Not everything needs to be fixed—some things just need to be felt

It sounds lovely in theory—go with the flow.

The words appear in calligraphy over watercolor waves. They show up in Instagram captions beneath beach photos and sunrise meditations. We say it when things don’t go our way, or when we’re trying to sound wise about disappointment. Just go with the flow.

But when your life feels like it’s dissolving in front of you, that phrase doesn’t soothe—it stings.

What flow?
What river?
What if the current doesn’t know where it’s going either?

I’ve wrestled with that.

I’ve stood in rooms I no longer belonged in, holding onto identities that had long outgrown me. I’ve clung to relationships because they felt familiar, not right. I’ve watched dreams change form and quietly resented the way life seemed to drift away from the script I had written for it.

And every time someone told me to “go with the flow,” I wanted to ask — and what happens when the flow leads you somewhere you didn’t ask to be?

I used to think going with the flow meant resignation. A kind of passive spirituality. The art of convincing yourself you didn’t care, so you wouldn’t have to feel the ache of losing control.

But that was before I started practicing Zen. Before I understood what flow really is—not a state of laziness, but a discipline of letting go.

As a psychology graduate and longtime student of Buddhist thought, I’ve spent the last decade exploring how Eastern philosophy intersects with the emotional messiness of modern life. One of the biggest misconceptions I’ve seen—both in others and in myself—is confusing surrender with passivity. But true surrender requires radical presence. It asks you to be awake inside your discomfort, not numb to it.

In the zazen tradition, you sit without a goal. You don’t try to feel better. You don’t try to become enlightened. You just sit. Breath after breath. Moment after moment.

And in that space, you begin to see the difference between resistance and responsiveness. You begin to notice how often you try to force meaning, how you rush to fix or reframe, how your mind grabs at anything to avoid the stillness of simply being where you are.

Flow, it turns out, isn’t what happens when life gets easy.

It’s what happens when you stop clinging to what life was supposed to be.

But we don’t learn that from the world around us.

We learn to plan.
We learn to build strategies, optimize timelines, schedule our joy.
We learn that success comes to those who force outcomes.

And that pain is just a puzzle to be solved.

Even in the wellness world, we’re sold productivity disguised as presence. Mindfulness becomes a tool to perform better, sleep better, sell better.

But there’s nothing performative about surrender.

The Buddhist idea of anatta—non-self—reminds us that who we are is not a fixed shape. We are always changing. Always becoming. Always disappearing and reappearing in new forms.

But that terrifies the ego.

So instead of flowing with life, we try to freeze it. We grip our identities like life rafts. We label our feelings as problems. We call uncertainty a failure of planning. And when things fall apart—as they inevitably do—we don’t adapt. We panic.

We weren’t taught how to dissolve with grace.

That’s why I wrote Hidden Secrets of Buddhism—to help people reconnect with a way of living that’s rooted in presence, not perfection. The deeper I went into Buddhist teachings, the more I realized that “flow” wasn’t an outcome. It was a relationship—with change, with uncertainty, with self.

A few years ago, I was walking along the Mekong River at dusk. I had just ended something that wasn’t quite a relationship, but had left me aching all the same. I felt hollow and uncertain—two states I had always tried to fix.

But that night, I didn’t try. I just walked.

I watched the river drift without rush, carrying leaves, bits of wood, the occasional plastic bag. Nothing in it fought the direction. Nothing asked for guarantees.

And I remember thinking: If I could trust like this—even a little—I might suffer less.

Not because the pain would vanish. But because I wouldn’t be so afraid of it.

Because maybe the river doesn’t owe us a destination. Maybe it only asks us to stay open.

To keep moving, even when we don’t know what we’re becoming.

Going with the flow, then, is not passive. It’s the hardest thing I’ve learned to do.

It means letting love go, even when the story still feels unfinished.
It means changing careers, even when the title sounded impressive.
It means sitting with failure—not to fix it, but to understand what it wants to teach you.

It means releasing the fantasy that your path will be linear.

That you’ll always feel certain. That you’ll always know what’s next.

Because sometimes flow leads you through seasons of stillness. Through grief you thought you’d outgrown. Through the quiet rebuilding of your identity, brick by honest brick.

There’s a Zen koan that goes:

“The wind moves. The flag moves. But ultimately, mind moves.”

Everything we experience is filtered through perception. What we call stuck might just be a refusal to see. What we call lost might be the exact path we need to walk.

Flow isn’t about feeling good.

It’s about being real. And most importantly, about learning to notice what is, instead of obsessing over what should be.

When I teach mindfulness or speak with readers of Hack Spirit, this is what I emphasize most: presence isn’t glamorous. It’s gritty. It’s sitting with your fear of the unknown and choosing not to distract yourself. It’s letting your nervous system settle, breath by breath, until your awareness softens enough to feel like home again.

I still struggle with that.

There are days I want to push the river. Days I want answers instead of presence. Days I want my life to make sense instead of letting it unfold.

But then I come back to the breath.

To the way it rises and falls without my control. To the way it carries me, moment by moment, through every version of myself.

And I remember: I don’t have to know where this is going. I only have to keep softening my grip.

Because the deepest truth Buddhism ever taught me is this:

You can’t cling your way into peace. You can only release your way into it.

And going with the flow isn’t about pretending not to care.

It’s about caring enough to trust that what falls away was never yours to hold forever. And that what remains—quiet, unforced, true—was always yours to begin with.