Slowing Down

In our endeavor of Empty Mountain program offerings, we hosted and led a morning of mindfulness in Missoula last Sunday, during which I gave a talk on The Head & the Heart of Practice. You can listen to it here if you like. And we are now at the start of the fourth and final week of an online practice group I put together which is centered on what I call the 4 S’s: stillness, settling, slowing & softening. And more specifically: stillness of the body, settling of the mind, slowing down in space & time, and softening of the heart. There are 8 of us all together in the group, which takes place solely through a google doc, onto which I upload content I’ve created each week to engage with. It’s an unconventional approach, but it’s a nice low tech option that also has the benefit of being both low pressure and hopefully supportive. And besides, unconventional tends to suit me best anyway.

(As part of this group I recorded a short talk to go along with each S. You can listen to them on my Soundcloud page. Note: you don’t need to have a Soundcloud account in order to listen to the talks, however, you may need to copy and paste the link into your browser, in the event you’re on a device that tries to open the app.)

Last week in our 4S online practice group we focused on the act, practice and art of slowing down. Make no mistake, just because we live simply in a small cabin in the big woods doesn’t mean we automatically stopped being subject to all of the cultural conditioning that centers around the mainstream messaging about how busyness is a badge of honor when we moved here.

Living now as we do in the woods, relatively remotely, without close-by neighbors and very little in the way of vehicular noise or human produced sounds absolutely has a deep nourishing affect and positive impact on us, but lifelong learnings don’t dissolve and get replaced overnight. Everything everything everything takes practice.

While on one hand I understand the value, benefit and importance of practicing the art of slowing down, on the other I am still in the active process of untethering from the death grip of terrible ideas and incorrect beliefs instilled in me from birth and fostered every day by my surrounding culture. Intellectual understanding is way not the same as developing embodied insight, which is what results when we apply purposeful effort into taking real action. In other words: it’s one thing to think slowing down is a nice sounding idea and a whole other thing to actually practice slowing down.

Here’s what I think is true. There are myriad ways in which we can practice slowing down. And it’s important to start wherever we are. Slowing down can look like pausing in a parking lot in order to take notice of how the sunlight and clouds form a tapestry of heavenly display in the sky. It can look like doing less regular routine stuff amid a heightened period of emotional turmoil or life transition. It can look like taking refuge in poetry or music when our heart aches. It can look like taking an entire day to do nothing other than what we genuinely and truly feel like doing. It can look like giving ourselves permission to pull back from something or someone when we need space & time to digest, process, reflect or rest. It can look like literally slowing our roll when we notice we’re moving way too fast and frantically.

Something that is becoming clearer to me as time goes on is that I am unable to listen to my intuition when I don’t practice slowing down. We all have a deeper voice of intuition which is nourished by our own intelligence, experience, and wisdom. It is also fed by our blood ancestors, and I believe also by simply being human (we are energetic beings connected to all other beings after all).

The do more, go faster, more is better and better is never enough mentality of our surroundings is by design intended to carry us away from connecting with and forming a close relationship with ourselves. Which means slowing down takes work. And by “work” I mean it requires active effort and conscious participation and it won’t be easy. Since slowing down is specifically not supported or encouraged in our society it will not just happen magically on its own without our personal and purpose driven involvement. Did I mention everything takes practice?

Gosh I wish slowing down wasn’t so hard. But it is. And I think it’s helpful to explicitly say so. If we think slowing down sounds nice but we’re caught in the false impression that it’s supposed to be easy, it’s likely we won’t develop enough insight to actually do it because we’ll be trapped in the illusion of a fixed idea that just simply isn’t true. But just because something is hard doesn’t mean we shouldn’t do it. And in this case, when it comes to practicing the art of slowing down, the discomfort and difficulty involved is exactly why it’s so vital that we do it.

Slowing down is a genuine act of self care that benefits all beings. I’m not saying only slow down. I’m not saying slow down all the time. I’m saying that without involving ourselves with the practice of slowing down alongside doing everything that must be done, we will run ourselves into the ground. Always being in motion is not healthy or wise. We need down time. We need rest. We need to balance our on-the-go pace with an ability to come back home to ourselves. And this will take regular and ongoing practice.