Anyone has been depressed will know exactly what it feels like to know that the best way to feel better is to move, but feels so weighted down it is impossible to move their limbs. Sometimes it's like moving through treacle. To lift an arm, a leg, to move through space is almost impossible.

It can take a huge amount of determination and will to move against the heaviness of that feeling, more than anyone who has not experienced it can believe. Yet once your brain learns that movement is anathema to depression and anxiety, it sure finds a way to make you push through and do what you need to rise up out of the experience.

Apart from the all important movement of cortisol through my body, movement brings me from the head back to the heart, and to the earth. It is in these lower realms that the magic happens - I am brought into the present, feeling into the physical body and it's subtle layers, tune into the breath, and often achieve a sense of grace, presence and connection with what is, rather than what 'was' or 'will be'.

In this hotel room, rolling out my mat is liking rolling out a magical carpet.

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I put on my wireless headphones and put on a playlist - usually mantra. If you're interested in a mantra playlist, here's mine on Spotify. Whilst I was raised with the music free Iyengar yoga and taught to believe music was a distraction, now I know better - sound is simply another tool to bring you into the moment and to experience joy. Like the breath, the auditory senses can allow for a moment to moment experience. Combine that with the sacredness of sanskrit, the resonance of a drone or drumbeat, the euphoric, devoted sound of the human voice, and you have something close to heaven.

Moving through my own yoga flow is always more of a meditative experience than a youtube class to me. I'm lucky in that I am well practiced enough in yoga sequences to drop into a flow without much thought - warm up the spine, move through some salutes and standing poses, drop back down to the ground, forward bends to calm the nervous system, end with an inversion, savasana. To me, it's automatic, relieving me of my thinking mind. But I listen to my body, breathing deep into the knots and tensions, feeling into my hips, my spine, my shoulders. Long, slow movements through the spine in a fluid, intuitive way is like a dance - something that calls me far more than the rigid formulas of Iyengar yoga ever did, with it's emphasis on formulas for alignment that do not always agree with every body.

This kind of yoga is like a dance to me. There's a great deal of freedom as I move, closing my eyes, listening to the music and dropping into flow - an absolute immersion into a state of being, entirely in the present.

It is then the treacle liquifies, becomes pleasurable - the way my limbs move through space is not heavy, but part of the liquidity itself - not resisting, not fighting, not reacting, but simply being in a beautiful, divine moment, my heart open and my body connected to the earth that holds me.

Do you use yoga to move into flow and heal, comfort or nourish? What moves you into flow? @naturalmedicine is running a 'movement' challenge which you can read about in the pinned messages over at their blog. There's still a few days to enter - move it!