Lou Tomlinson

My Story

I've been coaching and mentoring for over twenty years. I work from a trauma-informed, somatically grounded approach.

I came to flow from two directions, neither of them peak performance.

The first: a midlife of intensity, change and existential searching that needed - urgently - a new framework for how I was going to live into a new future. The second: a lifelong spiritual emergence that had little language in the culture I lived in, unless I was prepared to go new age or religious, neither of which felt honest for me.

I had spent twenty five years in every tradition I could find, including a dark night of the soul where I felt outside of all of it. I wanted what Emerson called an original relation to the universe - direct revelation, not a record of it. But I wanted it with rigour. I saw my spirituality as a kind of jazz mysticism: I had the influences and the improvisation, but I needed to go back and learn my scales.

That rigour arrived in a Zoom room, in pink pyjamas, my dog's head on my lap (we were both having a rough time), surrounded by CEOs and gym bros at my first Flow Research Collective training. I was looking for the practical architecture for what I'd always known intuitively: that expanded consciousness, effortless action, and deep aliveness are not the privilege of monks and mystics. They are everyone's birthright.

The two directions turned out to be two sides of the same coin. An old Tibetan teaching is to use everything. The chaos and the search. The dark night and the radiant grace. The wound and the wisdom. Nothing wasted. Everything, eventually, the same work and the same wonder.

I live in East Sussex, UK, with my husband, stepdaughter, and menagerie.

Coaching & Practice

→ Certified High Flow Coach — Flow Research Collective (one of a finite number globally)

→ Certified Integral Somatic Psychology™ Practitioner, Supervisor & Trainer

→ Founding member, Flow Prone high-performance community and Flow Lab Xelerate Programme

→ 25 years training with Tibetan, Zen, and Shamanic masters

→ Certified Yoga Nidra teacher; active apprentice in the Qero tradition

→ Child & Adolescent Therapist: set up pioneering trauma recovery and resilience programmes for Unaccompanied Asylum Seeking Children

→ Co-directed the UK’s first Meditation with Horses retreats

Speaking & Writing

→ Published in Breaking Open: Finding a Way Through Spiritual Emergency

→ TEDx speaker

→ Talks at the London Philosophy Club, the British Psychological Society, and the Psychedelic Society

→ Writer, Editorial Director, and Writers Programme Founder at the Jaipur Literature Festival

→ Award-Winning Poet and Performer

→ Substack: Flow Spirit

I believe we’re living through necessary times of rupture and reimagining.

I believe that the discomfort you feel- the sense that something doesn’t fit, that you’re being called to something more authentic - is not pathology. It’s evolution.

I believe that transformation is not a luxury - it’s a responsibility we owe to ourselves and to each other.

I believe that the most rigorous spirituality includes psychology, neuroscience, and real-world practice. Not mysticism without grounding. Not science without soul.

I believe we’re not broken - we’re becoming.