I want you to try a simple test right now. It’s one I like to give people in almost every training I teach.

Without looking at your keyboard — can you name the keys on the middle row, left to right? How about the bottom row, right to left?

Most people can’t. And yet, if you’ve been typing for a few years, you can put your fingers on the keyboard and something extraordinary happens: your hands simply know where to go. Faster than thought without using attention. More accurate than concentration. You can type a sentence you’ve never typed before, without once going to memory to push a key.

That is not a trivial party trick. That is flow or flow know. That is non-conceptual effortless mindfulness and embodied knowing — and you’ve been doing it so routinely that you’ve completely stopped noticing what it actually is optimal embodied activity.

The Difference Between Body Scan and Embodiment Scan

In yoga, MBSR, and many mindfulness traditions, there’s a practice called the “body scan.” You’re guided to bring your attention to each part of the body in sequence. “Bring your attention to your feet. Now your knees. Now your hips.” The attention moves like a flashlight from part to part — which has genuine value. Research backs it up. It can reduce chronic pain, improve sleep, settle the nervous system.

But there’s something beyond that, and it’s what I call the embodiment scan.

In an embodiment scan, you’re not moving attention to the body from the outside. You’re letting awareness drop into the body and perceive it from within. The subject and the object are in the same location. You’re not checking on your hand from your head — you’re aware of your hand from within your hand itself. No phone line going back up to the brain. No report being filed to headquarters. Just direct, unmediated, spacious knowing from the inside.

When people do this for the first time, the responses are remarkable. I’ve worked with yoga teachers and ballet dancers — people who have spent years cultivating exquisite physical sensitivity — who say they felt their body from within for the very first time doing this practice. Athletes. Musicians. People who live in their bodies professionally.

What does that tell us? That the ordinary attentional system — even when highly trained and focused on the body — is still operating from a kind of headquarters in the head. There’s still a thinker doing the looking, a manager sending attention out and receiving reports. The embodiment scan doesn’t use attention that way. It’s awareness that is pervasive and local at the same time — not reaching toward the hand from somewhere else, but present within the hand directly.

Both Hands at Once

Here’s one of my favorite ways to recognize whether you’ve made this shift: can you feel both hands at the same time?

This sounds simple, but attention — the ordinary focused kind, the kind that dominates our waking hours — can only look at one object at a time. It has to scan back and forth quickly, creating the illusion of simultaneity, the way a film creates motion from still frames. If you’re “feeling” both hands by rapidly alternating attention between them, that’s the old system.

But when you drop into the embodiment scan, something different becomes available. The awareness isn’t bouncing back and forth — it’s already present in both hands simultaneously. Not because you’ve widened the flashlight. But because you’ve shifted to a different quality of awareness altogether: the spacious, pervasive, flowing kind that is the natural ground of the Self.

When that happens — both hands at once, both feet and hands, the space within the body and the space in the room, all arising as one continuous field of aware experience — you’ve stepped outside the attentional system. You’re in what I call flow consciousness. And that’s not a special meditative state you’ve manufactured. That’s your baseline, finally recognized.

Flow Is Already Happening, Everywhere

One of the most important things I ever understood about awake loving flow — and about teaching it — is that people aren’t starting from zero. Awake Flow isn’t something exotic that we’re importing into a life that doesn’t have it. It’s already woven through everything.

Typing is flow. Walking a familiar route is flow. A musician warming up on an instrument they’ve played for thirty years — that’s flow. A chef who’s made the same dish a thousand times, hands moving through prep without once consulting their thoughts — flow.

Csikszentmihalyi, who spent decades studying this state, found that a remarkable number of people enter flow most reliably not in leisure, but at work — in the middle of complex interpersonal challenges, problem-solving, creative tasks, even difficult conversations. Why? Because they’d found a way to meet the situation from a different operating system: open, responsive, not contracted around fear and self-monitoring. That’s not la-dee-da pleasantness. That’s a higher form of intelligent functioning.

The question isn’t whether you’ve ever experienced this. You have. You do. Every day.  

The question is: do you know how to recognize this? Do you have a way to return to it when you’ve drifted? Can you learn to live more and more from this ground — not just when the activity is easy, not just when conditions cooperate, but in the difficult conversations, the painful moments, the situations where the parts are loud and the stakes feel high? 

You then use effortless mindfulness to turn your awareness around, and you’ll notice that you’re not operating from a thinker or an ego center but instead a new normal that is awake, embodied, and interconnected. 

That’s the way to use flow as a door to living awake in the world. Start with the activity you know brings you into flow. Then make this small shift of awareness into recognizing its natural way of knowing—awake loving flow—the way of doing the typing even before you knew you knew how. So now you can learn how to live from here more often, if you’re curious. 

Loch Kelly is a nondual meditation teacher, IFS psychotherapist, and author of The Way of Effortless Mindfulness and Shift into Freedom. He is the founder of the nonprofit Effortless Mindfulness Institute. He leads retreats, trainings, and guided practices through his meditation app and online programs at lochkelly.org.