Slowing Down

It feels productive to tackle healing with an all in energy. This is why for many years I did MORE when I felt distant from my goals. I saw myself broken, needing to be fixed. So it seemed like the best approach to keep myself trained under the whip of self-criticism, judgment and inner performance reviews. Unfortunately, this constant digging and turning over every stone to remedy myself increased the stress hormones in my body until I ran myself into the ground. The story that I’m not enough, was playing in the background, fear gripping me, my every move driven by the need to be someone other than me.

I was running away from myself. When I started doing this work, I discovered that self abandonment never leads to healing or love. And I found that when I could let go of fixing me and just be present and accept myself, my pain, my mess my limits, my desires and the way my body, heart and soul relates to the world around me…. I could begin to heal. This required me to SLOW down.

You may be familiar with the states of the nervous system. Shut down or burnout happens in dorsal, where we experience depression, shame, grief, lack of motivation, dissociation and more… and in this state we NEED a slow and gentle awakening back to self and our sense of power. But it cannot happen through brut force. It can only happen in presence, acceptance and a felt sense of safety.

My new motto after learning about this is to move with the slowest part of me. Even when I am not in shut down, I always try to acknowledge where I am genuinely at–and we can never truly be further along than the slowest part of us. In fact if we push while part of us is still stuck, we fragment ourselves deeper into stress, dissociation and coping mechanisms. To force myself into a stretch or pace that my body or heart isn’t ready for only overwhelms my system further. So I try not to draw my baseline from what I think I should be capable of. I listen to the part of me that needs presence and pause.

There is beauty, reward and great wisdom in slowing down. It’s so gracious to pause and hold the hand of the slowest part of ourselves, to create safety that actually leads to growth, resilience and capacity.