There's a current pulling you right now—maybe several. The pull of repetitive thoughts cycling through your mind. The undertow of emotions you're trying to resist. The energy of people around you, the weight of the times we're living in. We spend enormous energy fighting these currents, exhausting ourselves in the struggle, often without realizing there's another way. Clinical psychologist Diana Hill invites us to stop resisting and start navigating.
The word "current" arrived as a gift. A poet, Rosemary Trummer, offered it during an evening event, and the next morning she had written a poem about swimming in the Pacific Ocean—a poem that included a single image that captured something essential: "I decided that day I would no longer be that person who stays dry." The phrase stuck. Not because it's poetic (though it is), but because it names the essential choice we face with every current in our lives: Do we stay on the shore, safe but disconnected? Or do we wade in and learn to move?
Hill identifies three distinct currents, each one real and each one powerful. The first flows within you—the current of your own energy, your thoughts, your feelings, your sense of purpose and motivation. This is the internal landscape where rumination happens, where confusion about why you're doing something can pull you under, where your attention gets caught in loops that repeat the same worry, the same regret, the same spiral.
The second current moves between people. It's the energy of being in a room together, the back-and-forth dynamic of a conversation or a game of tennis. We are, quite literally, impacting each other in every moment of connection—whether we're aware of it or not.
The third is the current of the times themselves—the collective pull of global events, cultural shifts, and shared crises. This is perhaps the strongest current, the one we can feel most acutely, and the one most likely to sweep us away if we're not grounded.
Hill uses a river metaphor to help us understand what happens when currents trap us. In kayaking, an eddy is a circular flow of water that forms alongside the main current. Eddies serve a purpose—they're a place to pull off the river when you need to pause, to gather yourself, to figure out your next move. But eddies are also places where you can get stuck, spinning in circles, going around and around without any forward movement.
This is rumination. This is repetition. In a group therapy session that morning with therapists from across the country, Hill heard the same pattern from nearly everyone: "I feel like I'm saying the exact same thing in this group that I was saying a month ago." Their clients were reporting the same experience—the same worry brought up week after week, the same argument replayed, the same stuck pattern spinning without resolution.
Getting trapped in an eddy isn't a failure or a flaw. It's what brains do sometimes. The problem isn't being in the eddy; the problem is staying there, exhausted and convinced that the circular motion is the only motion available.
This is where psychology offers its first surprising insight. When you're stuck in an eddy—caught in rumination, in resistance, in that whirlpool of repetitive thought—how you talk to yourself matters more than you might think. Not in a motivational-poster way, but in a measurable, neurological way that actually changes your capacity to move through the pattern.
In 2014, psychologist Ethan Cross conducted a series of seven experiments exploring this phenomenon. He asked people to come in and give a speech under pressure, knowing they would be evaluated. Half the participants were instructed to repeatedly say to themselves "I'm anxious," using the first person. The other half were told to say their own name and then describe their emotion: "Diana is a little scared right now."
The difference was measurable and significant. The shift from "I'm" to your own name—from inside the eddy to just outside it, observing it—changed how people performed. It changed their actual ability to move.
Hill offers a practice you can try right now: Think of something you're feeling—anxiety, frustration, grief. Say it to yourself in your head: "I'm anxious." Feel where you are in that statement. Now shift: Say your own name first, then the same thing: "Diana is anxious." The perspective changes. You're no longer the eddy; you're the person observing the eddy. That shift is not a trick. It's a skill, and skills can be practiced.
Sometimes this looks like being an internal cheerleader instead of a critic. Sometimes it's simply witnessing your own experience without judgment—"Yes, I'm in an eddy right now. We all get into eddies." The moment you can name it from outside of it, you've already begun to move.
The practice extends beyond your internal dialogue. When someone you love is stuck—caught in their own eddy, caught in a pattern—Hill describes the choice we all face.
She woke one morning to find a half-eaten Popsicle on her new couch and stepped-on cheese crackers ground into the floor. Her son, of course. In that instant, she could feel the pull toward her own eddy: the frustration-spiral, the mental loop of "How could he," the cascade of judgments about responsibility and care. She could choose to enter that eddy with him, to spin together in mutual frustration.
Or she could pause. Observe. Choose not to add her own circular energy to his pattern. Focus on what actually matters instead of what the moment is tempting her to make it about.
This is what it looks like to navigate currents together—not by trying to control the other person's current, but by choosing where you put your own attention, your own words, your own energy.
The ocean current metaphor isn't just poetic. There's real science underneath it, and it contradicts what most of us were taught as children.
Hill grew up being warned about undertows—terrible, grabbing things that would pull you under by your toes and drown you. This childhood terror shaped how she thought about currents: as something to fight, to resist, to fear. It turns out this is almost exactly backward.
Current research on actual ocean currents shows something different. If you're caught in an undertow or rip current, fighting it—trying to swim directly back to shore against the current—is the worst thing you can do. You'll exhaust yourself and likely drown. Instead, you swim parallel to the shore, moving along the current until you're out of its pull. Only then do you swim toward shore.
There's a deeper principle here: Sometimes the way forward is not to resist the current directly. Sometimes it's to move at an angle, to find the shoreline, to let the current take you somewhere and then redirect from there. Fighting the force directly is often the thing that finishes us.
Hill speaks about flow—the state where effort and ease merge, where you're moving with something rather than against it. But flow doesn't come from pure relaxation or pure effortless drifting. It comes from a specific combination: You develop skills through practice and discipline, and then you learn to let go and trust those skills in the moment.
This is why musicians practice scales for thousands of hours. This is why meditators sit. This is why athletes drill. You build capacity so that when the moment comes, you're not thinking—you're flowing. The skill is underneath, internalized, and the flow is on top.
The same is true for emotional resilience and for moving through life's currents. You can't think your way into flow. But you also can't float your way into flow without any skill underneath. The work is to build both simultaneously: to develop your internal resources while also learning to release control and trust the process.
The dinner conversation that sparked all of this began with a provocation: "Are we doomed?" It's the question underneath so many of our currents right now, especially the collective current of living through a time of genuine uncertainty and crisis. The question shifted, though, when Rosemary suggested it: "Why are we not doomed?"
Hill's answer points to several things. One is our capacity to recognize the eddy and shift our relationship to it—that metacognitive skill we've been practicing. Another is connection itself.
Neuroscience is discovering that human connection isn't a luxury or a nicety. It's foundational to our resilience. When neuroscientists place EEGs on people's brains to measure stress hormones and inflammatory responses, there's one thing that consistently buffers against the physiological effects of threat: being in community. Being in a room with people. Being witnessed. Being held in someone's awareness.
Hill has spent over 20 hours of her life in meditation over the past 20 years—a significant commitment to solitude and internal work. But she also emphasizes what happens when that solitary practice meets the presence of others: something shifts. The nervous system registers it. Healing happens faster. Clarity emerges more readily.
"There's this new way of studying brains," she notes, that reveals how quickly human synchrony changes our actual neurology. In just 5 minutes of genuine presence together, our systems begin to entrain to each other. We're not separate, isolated sufferers struggling against currents alone. We're swimmers in the same river, and our presence to each other changes everything.
The meditation practice that closes the talk brings these elements together: learning to notice the currents without being swept away by them, learning to speak to yourself from a place of gentle observation, and learning to feel the current of connection with others in the room, right now, in this moment.
One insight keeps returning: The moment you're in right now is not the eddy. The eddy is the past replayed, the future feared, the current that pulled you yesterday. The present moment—where you are, who's with you, what you can actually do right now—is always available as a place to stand.
The practice is simple but not easy: Notice which current you're in. Identify if you're stuck in an eddy—a repeating pattern, a circular thought, a relationship stuck in a loop. Shift your language about that pattern; speak to yourself from outside it, like you're a compassionate observer. Build skills through practice and meditation, then trust them. And remember that you're not navigating these currents alone. The presence of other people, real and embodied, is not a distraction from the work—it's part of what makes the work possible. Start where you are. Name the current. And consider: What if the way through isn't resistance, but navigation?
