Rest and Flow Meditation: Equanimity Through Letting Go

Rest and flow are two of the most practical themes a meditator can work with, and in a September 2021 virtual retreat sponsored by the Tucson Community Meditation Center, teacher Stephanie Nash argued that together they can ease a surprising share of everyday suffering. Recorded during a session she co-led with Kaishin Ashley, the video runs just over seventy minutes and walks listeners through two techniques drawn from Shinzen Young's mindfulness system: "focus on restfulness" and "focus on flow." Rather than treating them as abstract ideals, Nash approaches each as a working tool, with specific rest states, specific places in the body where tension hides, and a clear logic for why letting go of resistance comes before anything else. What follows explains the ideas she lays out, so the practice can be understood even by someone who never pressed play.

Why does resistance make suffering worse?

Nash opens with a claim that reframes the whole practice. When she is asked what an equanimity practice looks like, she says she reaches for rest and flow. Her reasoning is almost mechanical: the more a person practices rest, which she describes as release and non-resistance, the more equanimity and what she calls "lubrication" they have available. Then she states the rule plainly.

"If you resist something it guarantees it's going to hurt. And if you're really hurting there's a really high probability you've got some resistance there." (Nash, in the 2021 retreat session, around 1:40)

That sentence is the spine of the teaching. Pain is not treated as an enemy to be defeated but as a signal that somewhere, usually in the body, a refusal is still active. Nash says learning to locate that refusal and release it "with kindness" is, in her view, an incredibly powerful practice, because it lets a meditator selectively attend to soothing the nervous system. She also notes that rest tends to lead to flow, so the two practices feed each other rather than sitting side by side as separate exercises.

What is the blank rest state, and why does it matter?

Nash describes several places where rest can be found, but she singles out two as particularly practical. The first is blank. In her description, blank is what happens when the eyes are closed and the attention settles into a grayscale, empty field, a kind of ground beneath the images that appear when you look through them. Her reasoning for why it is so useful goes like this: whenever someone tunes into a sensation in the body, there is almost always a faint visual image attached, whether it is the outline of a shape or a picture of the body part in question. Sound works the same way, with a subtle picture of whatever is making it. Blank has none of that. "So there is no subtle visual of blank," she says, "and thus it's a kind of deeper pure rest state." (Nash, around 2:34)

Nash is open about her own view of the technique. She says she sees "very little similarity" between the rest states Shinzen Young describes and her own ideas, except for blank, which she regards as a portal to deeper and even transcendent states because of its purity. She recounts showing blank to a teacher during a retreat, who reacted with surprise at how quickly it took him somewhere deep, and she says that she has been told by Shinzen Young to teach it to as many people as she can, because the test is simply whether it works. That attitude, a preference for "what works" over doctrine, runs through the session.

For practical use, Nash says blank is her quick focusing tool and also the first thing she gives beginners. She places it at the start of her "10 Minute Chill" meditation and notes that it also works for quieting the verbal thinking mind, since the attention is put into the visual channel and the two use different parts of the brain. Newcomers sometimes ask her to turn the practice off, and her answer is that the relationship to it needs time to change. She says Shinzen Young used blank as an easy rest for first-time retreatants for many years.

How does relaxing tension around emotions work?

The second rest state Nash highlights is relax, but she gives it a narrow and specific job. Relaxing the body relaxes the nervous system, she acknowledges, but the more interesting use arises when emotions are involved. Her terminology is useful here. She distinguishes ordinary sensation from what she calls secondary feel: a layer of tension that wraps around an emotional sensation, not the emotion itself.

"It's a kind of tension around the emotion... and it comes in around the emotions and it holds them in place like a setting holds a jewel." (Nash, around 7:26 and 8:14)

How do you know if it is there? Nash's test is judgment. If some part of the mind, however subtly, decides that the emotion is not a good thing, the body usually tightens around it. The emotions she names are anger, fear, and sudden shame. Where that judgment lives, the jaw, shoulders, chest, and belly often tighten, and the tension is different from the anxious tightness in the chest itself. The practical instruction is simple: look for tension around the feeling and let go of just one piece of it. "You only need one to break away for the jewel to fall out," she says. Dropping the jaw or letting the shoulders soften back and down can be enough for the emotion to begin moving again. This is the point where rest turns into flow.

What does flow look like in meditation?

Nash says flow is her favorite aspect to explore. She places it in contrast with a familiar Buddhist framing, the instruction to watch impermanence as things arise and pass. In that view, the meditator asks whether a thing is coming or going, and often the answer produces attachment or fear about its loss. Nash's approach drops the question. "You don't care if it's coming or going," she explains in effect. The nature of experience is movement, and the meditator allows that movement to act as a kind of massage. For her, the enjoyment of watching things change is more sustaining than the grim reminder that everything dies. (Nash, around 9:50)

Flow in this sense is not passive. It begins with a release of resistance, then a willingness to let sensation keep changing. Nash uses sound as an example. Sound, she says, is vibration, and if you tune into that vibration as it moves, attention can settle into a continuous flow rather than a series of separate events.

How does the guided session put these ideas into practice?

Much of the video is the guided journey itself. Nash moves through the body slowly, inviting the meditator to notice the restfulness that is already present rather than trying to produce it. She asks attention to rest in places like the shoulders and the torso just below the ribs, where, she suggests, tension often collects. She offers a choice of something to let go of on the exhalation, and invites a slow, wave-like softening that spreads outward and continues after the breath has ended. Cool air coming in and warm air cooling out is one of the sensory anchors she offers, along with a suggestion to notice internal organs as part of a whole-body softness.

The session also includes options. Nash mentions that the practice can be done with eyes open, and she makes room for labeling experiences with words or dropping the labels entirely. In one segment she describes the practice of pulling out vocal labels, so that the attention rests on raw sensation. She repeatedly returns to the idea of allowing whatever is present, including pleasant and unpleasant sensations together, rather than sorting them. For someone who is exhausted or sleep deprived, she gently suggests that the practice can still be useful, with rest becoming a matter of what can be let go rather than what must be achieved.

As the sequence moves from rest toward flow, the instruction shifts from settling into a fixed state to noticing movement. Pockets of activity may appear, images may come and go, and Nash encourages the meditator to stay with whatever is present rather than stopping the movement. That transition is the practical purpose of pairing the two themes: rest creates the conditions for flow, and flow keeps rest from becoming stagnation.

Where to go from here

The most useful next step is to test the ideas in ordinary life before trying to master them in formal sitting. Notice where judgment tightens your jaw or shoulders around a feeling, and try letting go of one small piece of that tension. Experiment with blank for a few minutes when your thinking is loud, and pay attention to whether the grayscale field feels more restful than visualizing a sensation. Then notice whether the release brings any flow, a sense that the feeling is moving rather than stuck. Nash's framing is that the two practices work best as a sequence, and her session is a concrete model for that sequence, recorded in full at the 2021 Tucson Community Meditation Center retreat. Her free "10 Minute Chill" meditation, which she describes as built on blank and relaxation, is one place to begin, and her wider work is available through her own channels.