Slowing down

It feels, some days, as if someone reached over and turned the volume of life up to 11.

Not gradually—no slow turning of the dial—but all at once. A sudden whoosh that floods my system and leaves me feeling a little waterlogged, as if I’ve tipped into a state of overwhelm without even noticing the moment I crossed the threshold.

The constant barrage on our mental, emotional, and physical bodies has become so normalized that slowing down can feel almost…unnatural. Like we’re violating some unspoken agreement we made with the world. Pausing to feel, to digest, to ask the harder questions, to actually listen for the answers—it can feel countercultural in a culture built on acceleration, optimization, and perpetual productivity.

And if I’m being honest, there’s a part of me that still resists the slow-down. A part that really loves the sense of importance that busyness gives me. A part that thrives on momentum. The forward motion keeps me ever-so-slightly ahead of the more uncomfortable truths:

that everything is impermanent

that nothing is promised

that I don’t get to control what happens in the world

that my humanness is—on a lot of days—a beautiful, tangled mess of vulnerability.

The Upanishads remind us that beneath all the layers of activity, identity, fear, striving—beneath all of it—is the Self that never wavers. The one who watches. The one who knows. But to hear that Self? To feel it? We have to get quiet enough. Spacious enough. Willing enough.

Which sounds poetic, until you actually try it.

Sometimes I literally have to force myself to slow my roll, to undo the tightness in my shoulders, unwind my mind, and allow a softer rhythm to take over. At first—and I don’t know if this happens to you, too—my mind actually speeds up. It gets louder. As if it’s panicking: “Wait! We were doing so well! We had plans!”

It clings to its loops a little tighter. It tries to keep me in the familiar pathways of doing, doing, doing.

But eventually—slowly, stubbornly, and then suddenly—it begins to loosen. It stretches its fingers open. It softens.

And in that softening, I begin to sense my wholeness again.

Mind, body, spirit weaving back into one conversation instead of competing broadcasts, each screaming for airtime.

I come back to:

Here.
Here.
This breath.
This body.
This moment.

Allowing the nervous system to downshift, to rest and digest, to unclench its fists around whatever drama it was gripping. Allowing myself to be a human being again, rather than a performance of one.

This, to me, is the heart of digesting, nourishing and sustaining. The practice of yoga nidra, not the lie-down-on-the-floor-and-take-a-nap version (though bless that version—sometimes we all need it). But the deeper teaching: the art of entering conscious rest. The art of surrendering the body, the senses, the thought forms, the identity layers, one by one, until what is left is pure awareness.

The place where the Upanishads say we meet the ground of being. The place where we remember who we are beneath who we think we are.

Rest isn’t passive; it’s a reclamation.

When we allow ourselves to settle—really settle—we begin to drop below the surface of habit. Beneath the ways we’ve stayed busy to avoid heartbreak, old trauma, boredom, the ache of disconnection, or that quiet whisper telling us we’re not living as fully as we long to.

Only from this deeper ground can healing truly begin.

Only here do we become capable of choosing differently.

And this healing isn’t just emotional or spiritual. In slowness, the body finally gets to do what it knows how to do. Rebuild the immune system. Restore the adrenals. Repair what’s been frayed. The parasympathetic nervous system—the system of “rest and digest”—comes online, like turning the lights back on in rooms we forgot existed.

In stillness, we remember our original intelligence.
The inner knowing that was always there.
The one untouched by burnout, comparison, or urgency culture.

And here’s the part that always makes me laugh, because it’s so completely, beautifully human: even though I know all this—even though I’ve practiced for decades, even though I teach this, even though I’ve lived these truths in my bones—I still forget.

I still speed up.
I still get caught in the swirl.
I still believe the illusion that if I just do a little more, be a little more, produce a little more, then I’ll finally catch up with life.

(It never works. Life cannot be caught. But try telling that to the part of me that loves her calendar.)

Slowing down is not a retreat from life.
It’s the way back into it.

When we pause, we return to our senses—the senses that open the doors to our inner world. We reconnect with the breath that carries us from birth to death. We re-inhabit our bodies, our intuition, our capacity for presence. We re-member, literally putting ourselves back together.

The miracle isn’t that slowing down changes everything—though it often does.
The miracle is that it changes the knower of everything.
It changes the one who walks back into the world afterward.

Maybe this season invites exactly that:

A slow return to yourself.
A soft landing back in your own heart.
A willingness to see what’s underneath the noise.

Because the truth is, life will keep turning the volume up.
The world isn’t getting quieter.
But we can.

We can choose to rest—not as escape, but as nourishment.
Not as laziness, but as wisdom.
Not as a break from life, but as the reclaiming of life.

In stillness the Self returns to the Self.
In rest, nidra reminds us, we remember our wholeness.
In slowing down, we finally touch what’s real.

And maybe that’s the invitation of this time—not to finish strong, but to soften open.
Not to push, but to listen.
Not to master anything, but to remember everything.

To remember that slowing down is not the opposite of living.
It is how we find our way home.