What happens when you slow down?

Is it easy and natural for you to tune into your quiet, still, inner peace? Perhaps you attune to this state effortlessly between the necessary tasks of your days.

Or perhaps it is difficult for you to slow down. Maybe you find in any gap between moments you automatically reach for your phone, maybe you fill every second with social activities and even your walks and showers are filled with music, podcasts, or audio books.

Many people can find discomfort in stillness. It's often when we stop and slow down that we can be confronted with what we were unconsciously avoiding. This avoidance can take many shapes. It can look like using alcohol, weed, or sex to avoid sitting with what is within. Or, it can look more like the things we typically deem as 'healthy' and 'productive' such as being an incredibly hard worker, excersising a ton, or being very social.

It's important to note here that it is not the activity itself which is an avoidance, but rather the energy in which we do things or the reasons behind why. Anything can be used as a form of moving away from the discomfort that can come up when we pause or slow down.....even yoga, meditation, and learning can all be used as a form of bypassing emotions.

Are you leaving space in your life to slow down and rest?

Resting can elicit inner voices of criticism and judgement, sometimes in the borrowed words of parents or other caretakers who themselves didn't understand the power and importance of rest. Many people experience negative self-talk when they go to slow down, hearing things like "Don't be lazy" or experiencing a subtle inner shame.

Constantly being in motion, and feeling the need to be endlessly doing, doing, doing, is a trauma response. This unhealthy response to unprocessed emotions often gets hidden by society's validation of hyper-productivity. In some pockets of society, it can even be a badge of honor to boast how stressed and busy one is, a way of flexing usefulness and value.

Rest is an essential part of growth. It's only with proper nurturing and recharging that we gain the capacity to be full power in other moments. Finding this balance is essential to experiencing balance in other areas of your life as well.

Rest allows time to reset, to rejuvenate, and an opportunity to regain necessary equilibrium that you need in order to have mental, emotional, social, and spiritual wellbeing.

Consider in what ways you can bring more stillness and rest to your life, and how you will begin to put them into practice.