Lyotropic liquid crystals are found in many living systems (DNA is one such example) and involve long molecules in solution, often aqueous. The flow of such anisotropic fluids is highly nonlinear and, unlike the everyday thermotropic liquid crystals used in displays, the exploration of such flow has been rather little studied. Using both conoscopy and fluorescence confocal polarising microscope (FCPM) with dye-doped lyotropics we will undertake a detailed exploration of the viscodynamics of these anisotropic fluids for various pressure gradients (flow rates) quantifying the viscosity coefficients (there are five of them) and exploring the various nonlinear phase transition effects.