Where Does Flow Actually Come From?
Meri and I talk a lot about flow. Here's what we've actually learned about finding it.
When was the last time you felt fully present? Not "relaxed on the sofa for five minutes" present — the kind where time disappears and your head goes quiet.
That's flow. And it's the whole reason Meri and I started FemmeFlow.
We talk about this a lot between the two of us, so I wanted to write down what flow actually means to us, why "feminine energy" isn't just a buzzword to us, and the very specific, unglamorous things we each do to get back into our bodies on a hard week.
Two Friends, One Concept
Some of you might remember Meri and I from an earlier project, Mitä Muijat. That's still out there if you want to dig it up. It ran its course, and eventually we let it go quiet.
We wanted to start something fresh — but with some of that same honesty carried over. New year, new project, same two people who, as Meri puts it, "have always been good at talking too much."
That's really what this is: two friends who built a dance concept together, writing down the thinking behind it.
What Is FemmeFlow, Really?
FemmeFlow Experience is a dance concept Meri and I founded in 2024. Calling it "just dance" undersells it, though.
We're both dancers, and we wanted to bring something new into the dance world — but also bring dance to people who don't see themselves as dancers, who haven't danced much before, and hand them some of the magic it's brought into our own lives.
It was never meant to be a dance class in the traditional sense. It's a space and a community for women to explore themselves.
Meri puts the extra layer well: "Dance is a big part of us, but so is this grounded, earthy, go-with-the-flow side of us. We wanted to bring those two worlds together." That's where the meditation, breathwork, and journaling prompts come in — not add-ons, the point. "The dance world moves fast, and life moves fast. We wanted to build time around it — time to slow down, be in the moment, step out of everyday life for a while."
So What Actually Is Flow?
We don't think of "flow" as a wellness buzzword. It's worth unpacking, starting with the "femme" part of FemmeFlow.
Feminine energy gets talked about a lot online right now, and there are a lot of different takes on it. To me, it's surrender — playful, freer, less controlled. We all carry both masculine and feminine energy. Masculine is structure and control. Feminine is what lets go and surrenders to life.
Meri takes it further: "The world is built in a very masculine way — masculine values, masculine pace. Feminine energy is meant to be the softer counterpart. It doesn't push. It just goes where the waves take it."
And flow itself: time either stops or moves incredibly fast, and you don't notice either way. You're completely in the moment, fully focused on what you're doing. No stress, no fear, nothing that could break the state. You're just in it.
For me, dance gets me there fastest. For Meri, it's ice swimming.
"The flow state recharges your batteries. You focus on one thing at 100%, your sense of time disappears — and so do your thoughts. You're just... being. And being gives us so much." — Meri
What Actually Gets in the Way
Before the personal tools, it's worth naming what blocks flow in the first place.
Meri doesn't hold back on this one: "Modern life piles on this pressure that you need to be everywhere, everything, to everyone — the best version of yourself at all times. You should want a career, you should want a family, a nice car, look great, travel constantly. It feels like the world keeps pushing us to rush, like nothing is ever quite enough."
That pressure is exactly what keeps people from finding their own flow. The FOMO spiral is real — everyone else seems to be traveling, in perfect relationships, crushing it at work. "But what everyone else is doing doesn't mean that's what you're supposed to be doing too," Meri says. "We can't be everywhere. We can't be everything."
My Story: Chasing the Feeling, Even When It Made No Sense
I've got two sides — a spontaneous, leap-first side, and a planner who loves setting goals. The spontaneous side once moved me to England chasing a love of music, no safety net, just a pull I followed. Things moved in a certain direction for a while. Then the momentum stalled — work didn't come together, a relationship ended, and then the world itself intervened: COVID, Brexit, all of it. That's when I realized: let life show me the way. And it was — the signs pointed back to Finland.
Then there's the planner side. Goal lists for the year, ambitions, the comparison that creeps in around milestone birthdays. Turning 31, you notice friends living really different lives — some getting married, having kids, climbing the ladder at work. I'm fine, but there have been moments where I've thought: what am I actually moving toward?
After enough moves, job losses, breakups, and plans that never followed the plan, here's where I've landed: life almost never goes according to plan. I've mostly just followed what feels good in the moment, even without knowing where it leads. Sometimes it doesn't lead anywhere. But dance and music have always been the one thing that frees me.
That's the thread that eventually brought me back to Finland, back into training, and into building FemmeFlow with Meri.
My everyday flow tools:
A few conscious breaths before opening my laptop or answering a message
Morning stretching to open up the body — no five-minutes-a-day rule, no pressure
A pause between transitions — a breath before getting out of the car, instead of rushing straight into the next thing
Time in nature, kept simple: a cabin, a sunset, quiet music, nothing else required
There's nothing complicated about a sunset. I don't need to do anything except be there — myself, the sunset, a little music — and enjoy it fully instead of being somewhere else in my head.
Meri's Story: Learning to Sit Still, in Ice Water
Meri's flow practice starts somewhere unexpected: cold water.
"It came into my life during COVID," she says. "What's more socially distant than getting into freezing water nobody else wants to go near?" What started as a pandemic joke became a real practice, refined over the years into something closer to ritual than exercise.
"I don't go there to swim," she says. "I go there to arrive. To receive the cold and let go." The cold is intense enough that there's no room left for anything else. "My body and mind have no other option than to be in that moment. You have to surrender to it — if you fight it, you run straight back out."
There's a payoff on the other side. "There's something euphoric about it, and that winner feeling when you get out — your body fights through the cold and then suddenly you're warm. It matters in winter, when it's dark and cold and everything can feel flat."
She's honest about the seasons where flow is harder to reach: "If you're in a season of just doing, just surviving — that's okay. I don't always have time to breathe either. The goal stays there: come back to yourself, back to the things that let you pause. It's not always available. And that's allowed."
"What a gift it is to be allowed to be bored. To just be, to listen, to sense — because that's exactly where new thoughts come from." — Meri, on doing nothing at the family cabin
Meri's flow toolkit:
Ice swimming and sauna, especially in winter — her biggest breathing hole this time of year
Time at the cabin with nothing to do, on purpose
Actively varying activities so life doesn't flatten into one routine
Dance, for the days that call for something more physical
We're both eyeing a non-physical flow outlet for the year ahead, too. I want to pick guitar back up; Meri's circling crochet or painting. All my hobbies are physical right now, and I want something that gets me into flow without wearing my body out.
The Real Takeaway
Flow isn't one activity. It's a state, and it shows up through completely different doors — a dance floor, a frozen lake, a sunset with no phone in hand, three deep breaths before answering a message you don't want to answer yet.
As Meri says: "Life is hard. Life is heavy. The world keeps asking more of us. Those small moments matter — and if we don't take them, things don't stay well."
FemmeFlow is an invitation to find your own version of that moment — not someone else's Instagram-perfect version, but the one that actually gets you back into your body.
Written by: Jacinda Vuorinen
Want to hear this conversation in full? Listen to the episode here. And for more, follow along on Instagram @femmeflow.experience or check out upcoming workshops or events.
