You know that feeling when you’re driving behind someone and they’re going below the speed limit and you’re in a rush? The feeling of agitation that builds deep in your heart, the agitation that lights up your mind and creates a frenzied state? Or how it feels when you have a project to work on, when you finally have the time to work on it, and all you can do is distract yourself with all the other non-urgent tasks that don’t need your attention? The shear act of slowing down can destabilize our minds and create a sea of discomfort in our bodies.
Most of us are a flurry of constantly moving and thinking. When we try to deal with it and slow the pace down we’re often confronted with a tornado of messy feelings that can feel overwhelming.
But how can anyone fault us? We live in a society of constant production : from our 24-hour news cycle to access to everything we want at any time at Amazon. We’ve built a world of high productivity, and we have no patience when it comes to getting what we want. We want what we want when we want it and will go into massive debt to get it. We’re constantly taking in information from school, podcasts, books and taking no time to integrate it and chew on it. We spill our energy into creating, sharing thoughts, and jumping from one commitment to another.
We do not take the years needed to practice not knowing, slowing down, sitting in any discomfort. Everything is meant to build systems against our discomfort. We don’t know how to be uncomfortable, we’re void of patience, and we can’t handle discomfort in our partner, children, or friends. We can’t handle different opinions because we lack stability inside. We’ve completely abandoned intentional slowing down and exchanged it for utter collapse and burning ourselves out to the point that we isolate and disassociate in order to slow down.
This is why tired people are always tired. The tools they use to manage their fatigue only further drains them. If we want to build energy, we have to learn to harness our slowness, to create practices that allow us to slow down and be with the frustration, sadness, anger, and bitterness. We need to learn practices that teach and support us to slow down, teach us how to stay with it, let the friction build within, and know what it feels like to develop a relationship with friction.
If we aren’t intentional about creating this kind of time, we have to create it elsewhere, which means finding ways to build stress and friction in our lives through relationships, over-giving, and over-committing, that often ends in a storm of destruction. After years of using this kind of friction to burn away our discomfort, we end up, at some point, blowing up everything and making things more challenging for ourselves than necessary.
When we have practices and teachers that understand the importance of slowing down, of creating friction, of staying with dissatisfaction, we evolve and learn to be with our discomfort in wise ways. We learn to build resilience and have a capacity to let go and not be governed by our need to control.
For most of my life I created so much struggle; I picked up the wrong people along the way, people that would cause me immense pain and heartache. I picked up habits of moving quickly, incessant talking, avoidance, and deep disassociation in order to cope with my tremendous discomfort. I lacked teachers and a society that understood what it means to ‘teach’.
We need people who challenge us to slow down, to support us in staying with the very parts of ourselves that feel impossible to look at. We require practices of building friction by slowing down. It takes a stronger person to go slow; speed does not equal strength, it equals immaturity.
We can practice by studying with teachers who know what it means to go slow, how to teach going slow, how to sit in the fire of discomfort. We can do this by developing a relationship with yoga, meditation, breath, and by sitting without people or distractions. We can develop this by understanding how we move quickly, how we lack discernment with our time.
We need practices of slowing down, that’s how we build energy, that’s how we dissolve the parts of us that create distraction in our minds, the parts that confuse a busy mind with a healthy mind. We need to witness our own discomfort, to let it burn within us, so that we can then grow our energy. We can then build our strength and resilience. from learning to be with ourselves in the most intimate ways, the most vulnerable places within us need this.
A forest knows this well; growth and destruction are always occurring in the slowness of the wilds. It doesn’t move quickly but it’s the very system that decomposes everything on Earth. Almost everything will be decomposed by the plants, soil, bugs, and trees, slowly and effectively.
Perhaps you could practice one way to slow down each day. Like not taking your phone to the toilet with you, or standing in line and focusing on one inhale and one exhale, or waking up early to go sit beside a tree as the sun rises. If one thing could fundamentally shift your relationship with slowness, what could that one thing be for you?
With love
Noelle