Can You Slow Down?

In our busy modern culture, to become Masters of our Energy requires one thing: we must SLOW DOWN. When we are buzzing around getting things done, there is little time, space, and energy for awareness. Slowing down enables us to pay attention and become more aware. Then we can make better choices.

Slowing down? Does that hit you as something you need to do or quite the opposite? Do you feel the need to go faster? Certainly that is the predominant demand in our culture: to be faster and more efficient.

At a certain point, however, speed becomes counter-productive--the whole system breaks down. Especially when the system is our "personal energy system," there is a certain capacity beyond which we become inefficient--we get overstressed, exhausted, or sick. We can cover this over with caffeine and pain relievers for a while, but eventually we'll be stopped in our tracks.

Do you recognize any of these symptoms in yourself? Are you easily irritated? Do you lack patience? Do you have the feeling that things never get done? Are you often tired? Do you have strong cravings for sugar, fast food, caffeine, or alcohol? Do you lack enthusiasm and joy? All these can be signs that you're running in overdrive. All these can be signs that it's important for you to slow down.

There are two things that we can do to slow down and one attitude that we can cultivate to enable us to do these two.

LESS IS MORE
Sometimes less is more. Ask yourself how you can "do less" to increase the quality of your life. Is it working less, eating less, buying less? Does a bigger house, a nicer car, and more stuff add to the quality of your life? Or does it create more demands, more work, more insurance, more upkeep. . .? What is the optimum balance for you?

Can you do less? By doing less in terms of quantity we can increase the quality of what we do and the quality of our experience. The key, then, is where do we cut back?

To do less we need to prioritize. What is most important to you? It may not be what you are in the habit of doing. If this were your last day to live, what would you get busy doing? What has deeper or lasting value to you?

Now what doesn't fit that category? What are you doing that feels necessary, but isn't really important? We all have something that we can let go of. It is especially good when we can cut out something that we dread doing and that really isn't that important to us. That frees up lots of energy.

CENTERING ACTIVITIES
Second, we can practice an activity that slows us down and makes us more self aware. Certain activities slow down our heart rate, lower our blood pressure, relax our brain waves, and put us into a calm, awake, centered state.

A few examples of such activities are: yoga, t'ai chi, meditation, and slowly drinking tea while paying attention to our breathing and posture. Find an activity that attracts you and that puts you into a centered state. (This is different from watching TV or drinking alcohol: these desensitize us and zone us out. We become less aware of ourselves, rather than more.)

When we regularly take time for an activity that slows us down and increases our self awareness, we become familiar with this state of being. We learn to recognize it and appreciate it. We realize that our endless running around to acquire and achieve things can be easily replaced with the deep soul satisfaction of being calm and aware. We recover the joyful vitality that is our natural state of being. When we are frantically busy, we lose this experience.

Doing less and centering ourselves probably sound like good sense, but what keeps us from doing these things? Unde
eath our manic activity is an emotional attitude driving the whole process. What is it for you? Is it fear of not having or being enough? Can you catch yourself in the middle of your busyness and tap into what is driving that action? Do you lack trust?

TRUST
When we take time to slow down, to check in with ourselves, and to become familiar with a centered state, we experience a sense of unity with the wholeness of life. We feel at home in ourselves and in our world. We feel connected to the larger field of life and we come to know that, when we come from "here," all is well. We come to TRUST the larger process of life and our place in it.

When we come from an experience of trust, we do just what we need to do and let go of the rest. We don't feel the need to get it all done ourselves. We relax, enjoy the process, and put our heart into what and who matters most.