There’s a lot of stops and starts in most people’s early practice. You might frequently change techniques, or you might pause frequently between strokes, or you might keep losing your rhythm as you struggle to remember what to do next. Even if each stroke is perfect, the practice can feel choppy. Flow is the glue that holds it all together, and it’s a product of repetition, not diversity.
So the first thing to do is simply to use fewer techniques in a single practice session. Instead of trying to cover everything, just pick a couple of strokes and repeat them over the same area. That helps eliminate a lot of hesitations and keeps your hands moving. And when you take away the burden of constantly deciding what to do next, the strokes start to flow together.
One of the most common culprits is a tendency to lift your hands up off the body too often. Every time you break contact, the flow of the practice is broken. So try to maintain contact even when you are switching from one stroke to another. Instead of picking up your hands to reposition, for example, just slide them across the surface of the body. That keeps the practice flowing and helps your hands find their way around.
Another common problem is an inconsistent rhythm. If you are speeding up and slowing down too much, the practice will feel erratic. So pick a speed and try to maintain it for a while longer than you normally would. As soon as your rhythm settles in, your hands will begin to move more smoothly and it will become easier to transition from one stroke to the next. If you find yourself speeding up or slowing down unintentionally, just pause for a second and start over.
To cultivate flow, spend a few minutes in one of your practice sessions just practicing transitions. That means just moving from one stroke to the next without stopping, focusing only on the transitions. Pay close attention to how your hands move, how the pressure changes, and how your body needs to adjust to perform the stroke. It might seem like a pretty mundane way to spend a practice session, but it will directly affect the flow of the practice.
If you get stuck, just slow down and go back to simpler strokes. Flow is not something that you create by making the practice more complex. It is something that emerges as your hands get more comfortable repeating the same strokes over and over again. With enough repetition, your hands will start to anticipate what comes next, and the transitions will start to feel more natural.
As you cultivate it, you will find that the practice starts to feel more continuous and less choppy. Your hands stay in contact with the body, the rhythm stays steady, and the transitions get smoother. What used to require a lot of thought and attention starts to happen automatically, freeing you up to focus more on the body.