Living the Slow Life
Living the Slow Life
Carl Honoré in is TEDtalk, “In Praise of Slowness” gives a wonderful address about the benefits of adapting to a slow rhythm in life; and the detriment of maintain the break-neck speed of productivity our culture so sports.
2 years ago, I worked with a 13 year-old in therapy. He had been passing out in class and neurological tests came back inconclusive. As the mystery of his suffering grew, so did his anxiety, and so did his fainting spells. After just two psychotherapy sessions, this client stopped fainting because we began having conversation about Anxiety—the experience of it and the ways he’s been surviving it. We found that he spent so much time on his phone playing games and watching YouTube that the machine was creating him in its own image. His classes and family culture also expected him to be(come) a machine; accomplishing so much work at a frenetic pace he identified by tracing a sine wave with his hand. It turns out that Anxiety moves at a reality frenetic rhythm, with deep troughs and high peaks. This particular client, however, wanted to remember his humanity, wanted to live in the world in a way that felt like home. He traced the rhythm of “straight chillin’”, as he called it, with shallow troughs and low peaks. He came to understand that one of the plants in my office also moved/lived at this pace and so began “plant watching”. This was a meditative practice the client would use for 5 minutes at the beginning of every session—and later with the group therapy he constructed by bringing a group of friends to session with him!
Plant Watching was practice simply by paying attention to the being of the plant—smelling, touching, viewing, even tasting! Many other nature-based meditations are available to use as my clients and I abandon the office to sit lakeside and watch a sunset while we talk, or take my therapy dog, Kodiak, on a walk. Re-membering is a practice of grafting something back onto ourselves. And nature is an incredible part of our nature that we can use to calm through, challenge by, and learn from.
If Anxiety is overwhelming you, it may be because you haven’t experienced something real—something that resonates in your heart and reminds you that you have a body, that you have a soul, and a way of connecting with other living beings instead of the synthetic world we often spend our time and attention on. Please come join me for a conversation about how we can access nature, relationships and community together.