On a personal level, my nickname in high school was “slow-mo”.
It was given and used with endearment and love – I was not amused.
However I could not shake the truth of the thing – I at my essence, at my core, am slow.
I have always carried within me a deep well of stillness wherever I went.
Slow does not agree with our current cultural paradigm, nor the past one I grew up in.
Thankfully, rural living, being an only child, and having time to roam, read, and contemplate also held me in my early experiencing of the world.
But school, alarm clocks (oh, time!), and the pressure to conform to other people’s rhythms always pulled fast and try as I might, I tried to fit the mould.
A few years ago when I found out about Human Design and found out I am a “Projector” energy type, I was not surprised.
Isn’t the Projector the epitome of slow?
And yet, accepting this all in stride, like many human creature living in a foreign world that does not respect our animal nor spiritual beingness, my slowness still felt like a wound that needed healing. After all, I still have to function in this so-called “modern” world, right?
In a way, I understand the need for us to want to “biohack” everything.
Our world, the one we’ve built in the Western World, it not built for us.
As a way to understand and perhaps to heal my relationship with slow amongst other things, I found my way out of more structured movement I had practiced for years, like yoga and pranayama, and kinesiological movement, to organic, fluid, and subtle movement practices. Organically things got way slower and slower, subtler and subtler.
Eventually and likely as a result of my own exploration of my naturally slowed down I found my way to Continuum Movement, though at the time, I didn’t know what what was coming through me had a name, an origin story, and a practice.
Finally.
A practice that not just honours, but centres around slowing wayyyyyyy down.
And after many many years of dancing with this practice, in and out, I’ve found my way back to it once more and I am noticing something rather profound that I wanted to share.
One of the things I least expected after recently deliberately coming back to an old, more Luddite time in my life, after years of running a mostly online base healing business, is the imprint and impact my cell phone and social media has had on my nervous system, my creativity, and my intuitive capacities.
As a person of slowed down nature, naturally, I was surprised to notice how used to fast my system has become accustomed and the domino effect of its impacts.
Although it’s been years since I’ve subconsciously tried to “run” my system to “keep up” with the rest of my peers, I am in awe seeing the ripple effects, even now.
As I am being called back to my intentional practice of slowness and deep listening, I am deleting more and more apps, and creating more and more space – mental and creative space, but intuitive space too.
I am reading books, rather than watching shows or movies. I am reading soooo many books – fiction, non-fiction.
I am dreaming and writing so so much.
And also, I am noticing my inner child and her desire to “fit in”.
I notice too, that that old wound of being pigeonholed as slow with all of its subtle but true negative connotations (lazy, unmotivated, sloth, useless, or even selfish). It’s still tender and perhaps always will be a little sore. After all, we live in a world that fetishizes the fast, and belittles the slow. We praise productivity and diminish creativity.
We dismiss intuition as untrustworthy, and we separate ourselves from the “stuff” that makes the world as if we are not part of it.
The earth is a “resource” to be mined and there is only value in the exploiting of it.
We believe it’s possible to “own” land, forgetting that we are of the very land delusionally believe we “own”.
Being slow, praising slow, practicing slow I suppose is my rebellious act of embodiment in this topsy-turvy world I live in.
I’m sure I will be writing more about this again soon.
xo,
Jenn
PS – The topic of slowness also came up on this week’s podcast. You can listen to the episode HERE, or find it on Apple Podcasts or Spotify.