Imagine on the frontlines of a hospital in New York a group of nurses face confronting and relentlessly stress inducing images daily. Once a day, for just four minutes the nurses have an opportunity to escape into pure Icelandic nature and meditate, using a Flow VR headset, where they can breathe, let go of the stress of the day, and focus on what their heart desires. They might want to find more peace, calm or focus. Whatever they need in that moment, that positive energy begins to manifest.
“What you are seeking is seeking you.” wrote the Eastern mystic poet Rumi to describe what happens in meditation, and in life . Once you make the effort to search within, the quality you are looking for begins to come to you in that very moment.
How did Flow VR make it to the front lines at one of the leading hospitals in New York? It all started at Reykjavik Roasters, one Saturday afternoon in February, before the crisis hit. An elegant American couple came in and sat next to Flow founder, Tristan Elizabeth Gribbin. They easily got into a lively conversation. They were fascinated by Tristan’s personal story and she by theirs.
Originally from Palo Alto, California, Tristan founded Flow ehf in Iceland in the summer of 2016 and since then she has led hundreds of corporate meditation classes. Throughout her life she has tried all kinds of meditation in different places in the world along with her husband film director Stefan Árni of Arni and Kinski, who is the Creative Director of Flow.
The American couple, it turned out, are both in design in New York, the husband an architect and the wife Jen an interior designer. Jen immediately saw that Flow could be a fit for her workplace at New York’s most progressive hospital, NYU Langone. Tristan arranged to give Jen a headset to take home with them to show the director of research and her staff.
Tristan received an email a couple of weeks later to say that everyone Jen showed the headset to fell in love. She wrote: “ I used this with my very stressed staff today they all love it and want to know how to get it!” Then when the crisis hit hard, Jen wrote: “I managed to get the Flow unit delivered to the hospital yesterday and they are going to utilize it with the nursing staff who have been working on the front lines daily.”
”Meditation in this time of crisis becomes more urgent than ever. Meditation is no longer “nice to have” but a “must have”. It’s a survival tool,” states Tristan. This becomes clear as people are seeking meditation online by the millions. Literally tens of millions are downloading meditation apps, and are watching YouTube meditations. The digital meditation market is expected to reach 20 Billion this year.
This is not the first time that Flow has been acknowledged by influencers in the Medical Industry in the USA. Powerful doctors have been fans of Flow — including Dr. Walter Greenleaf, Neuroscientist and founder of the Virtual Human Interaction Lab at Stanford University, the leading researcher in the field of mental wellness and VR, Dr. Daniel Kraft, MD founder of Exponential Medicine who invited Flow to showcase at his conference in San Diego, California, and Dr. Rafael Grossmann MD, FACS in Maine, the first doctor in the world to perform live surgery wearing the Googleglass!
All of these visionaries believe in the effectiveness of Flow meditation in VR. “Flow provides a wide variety of powerful tools, 1. Breathe 2. Move 3. Let go 4. Calm 5. Focus and 6. Restore and the Flow method has a special power that helps people connect to a profound experience of meditation from the very first try”, Tristan says, “These tools are designed to help people living in our challenging and chaotic climate. We are dealing with extremely high levels of stress and anxiety during this current crisis and people need relief.”
Flow was founded in Iceland with a mission to provide immediate access to the proven benefits of meditation through cutting edge software, like in virtual reality (VR). Now serving corporate wellness programs in over forty locations in Iceland in leading corporations, Flow brings innovative solutions to the stress and anxiety that is becoming rampant in our modern lives.
We at Flow are grateful to be working with meditation at a time when meditation is needed more than ever. Founder Tristan says that meditation has the ability to “…help people to open up to the depth of everything that is inside of us, to break free from old patterns and thoughts that hold us back. People are always seeking more well-being, happiness and inner strength. It is our own responsibility to choose what we do with our lives and how we go about this search. Flow is here to support that.”