Slow down to speed up

I write a lot about slowing down. It has been one of the big learnings for me in my life but overall, if I think of all the people I’ve coached over the years I think on of the biggest issues most of us face is the disconnection from our bodies. This is pretty serious, it is causing lots of health issues, combined with the crazy pace that most people are expected to work at now, it is causing lots of dysregulated nervous systems. This causes some pretty poor decision making and poor behaviour to emerge.

When we slow down we are able to be more present with our life, with what is happening right now. That is where life is happening.

I think one of the most important skills we can learn is to recognise our stress responses and what our habitual patterns are when it comes to reacting to stress. Fight, flight, freeze or fawn? What do you do? Do you get angry, do you want to move, can you not stop talking, do you go into people pleasing mode, do you words escape you and your feel overcome with brain fog? These are all typical signs of a stress response. I generally want to argue or walk away. Sometimes I please, although this is a very atypical for me and the times I have done I’ve been able to observe myself in the moment and thought why are you acting like this?

When we are in overdrive we are making decisions and choices that often are not well thought through, may come from a child part of us, or we spray our emotional response all over people and that takes time to clean up. Or some of us just collapse and withdraw and this is not a great place to be stuck in your nervous system.

When you can start to be aware of your stress response in action this is when you can start to take put practices in place that help you regulate yourself back to a place in your autonomic nervous system that is a bit more grounded and calmer. Practices that help you soothe yourself in the moment. One of the best ways to do this is by learning how to listen to your body and identify the sensations that you are feeling right in the moment of the trigger.

When we slow down and check in with our bodies, take the time to ourselves each day for time out, we are actually able to access so much more information than we would guess. Do you know our body takes in 90% more data than our brains. In truth our body and brain are one but our body is reading our environment all the time. 90% is quite unbelievable isn’t it? When we don’t check in with ourselves we miss all of this.

This becomes super important when we are going through big life transitions because they are generally times of great change so we can easily get overwhelmed. Slowing down has a tremendously positive impact on our quality of life because we start to be aware of what is going on around us all the time. All those parts of life happening that we were missing, we start to notice. We start to build a bit more capacity to regulate ourselves in our nervous system when we practice slowing down techniques like using our breath, or body check ins and that brings us into presence. It is a good place to be.

What I notice in people I coach who are in midlife is that when they start to slow down, their health and wellbeing improves, their perimenopause physical symptoms often dissipate and this gives them more time and confidence to explore the existential questions that they find themselves facing. It gives you more time to reflect on how you can set yourself up to live well in your second half of life. It gives you more time to think and feel into what feels meaningful and purposeful to you.

This is why we can speed up when we slow down, we have more clarity, we are more conscious and deliberate and can take in more perspective.

What would happen if you gave yourself permission to have thirty minutes each day of slow time?

Dancing with Grief

I’ve been thinking about grief a lot this week, well actually I’ve been thinking and feeling it. My husband’s grandfather passed away earlier in the week. He had turned 98 on Sunday and then died on Tuesday. We knew it was coming. He lives quite far from us and we all said goodbye to him in July which was the last time we saw him. He was sharp, funny and a true gentle man. He play online Bridge with my husband and kids and anyone else who turned up online up until about ten days ago.

Grief is a funny emotion. Most of the others pass through if we let them in a matter of minutes but grief seems to come through in bursts and can stick around for quite a while. What I notice, is when I am quiet and still that is when it comes. In surrender.

Even then it comes in bursts, and can keep coming for quite some time. When our Grief last longer than six months, it is now pathologised as depression. To me this seems like a total misunderstanding of grief.

A colleague said to me a few years ago, grief is love not able to be expressed.

I loved this insight and to me this seems true because we always grieve love we have lost, over time it fades but does it ever really go away?

For grief doesn’t just occur when a beloved passes. When relationships end we grieve. When we have acute illness we grieve. When our youngest or only child passes milestones we grieve because we know that we will never see or experience that stage again as a parent.

As our bodies age and we move into a new rite of passage, stage of life, we grieve for what we leave behind and for all the dreams and aspirations that we had that we were not able to experience. We grieve for the choices we made that allowed us to walk through a door way and miss another. We think of what may have been.

When we grieve in the present we often tap into a reservoir of unresolved grief from the past. Grief that wasn’t finished, that still lives in our bodies. It is never too late to heal unresolved grief. Healing is always an option and your body will tell you someway and somehow. Our darker emotions are rooted in alchemy, they always take us some place else. When we open to the wisdom of the darker emotions, particularly grief, there is always another emotions waiting for us. Grief often gives us gratitude.

“The gift that grief offers us is the capacity to see deeply into the way things are. Life is limited. We are here for only a short time. Grief asks us to know this, not only in a disembodied, cerebral way, but in the marrow or our bones - to look into the reality of death and loss with our usual egoic blinders on”

— Miriam Greenspan - 'Healing through the dark emotions'

Unexpressed grief holds a lot of hurt. Culturally we don’t express death well. We don’t acknowledge that the journey of life is a series of death and rebirths all the time as we grow and journey into different stages of our lives. Unexpressed grief gets passed down through generations in individuals and societies and comes out culturally in often unrecognisable forms; forms that are sometimes violent and highly destructive. The lack of acknowledgement of our grief is bringing about the destruction of the planet. The symptoms; increasing busyness and consumption, increasing depression, loneliness, anxiety, boredom and apathy.

I don’t think there has been a more important time to learn the gifts of listening to our body, to be with our darker emotions and learn the transformational power that they bring.

If this post resonates with you feel free to pass it onto a friend.