Tiburon woman turns midair terror into self-help book on flow states

In December 2000, Laurie Smith and her husband, Jim, were flying over Sudan en route to a dream vacation in Kenya when their plane suddenly plummeted 10,000 feet and began flying on its side.

She would find out later that a passenger had burst into the cockpit and attempted to commandeer the plane.

Smith says she thought she was going to die, and she and Jim began to say their last words to each other. But something else happened to Smith in that same moment.

“Almost as if in a trance, I started making Reiki symbols in the air and imagined sending white light to the cockpit,” the Tiburon resident writes in her new book, “The Flow Habit,” which was published Dec. 30 by self-help publisher Hay House. She says “a deep calm” came over her.

Smith, 56, says her experience on the plane was one form of what psychologists call “flow” — the sense of being deeply absorbed, often with a sense of interconnectedness and a feeling that time speeds up or slows down.

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