Slowing Down, One Step at a Time

poppies and rye on a bike ride home in Zürich Oberland - May 2026

Today the rains come in waves with the sun. It is a dancing summer day, the kind where you never know what arrives over the hills with the passing clouds or blue skies. All is in flux. All is fleeting and a bit brief, but each phase has its own fervor; the rain like lead sheets, the sun warm and golden.

The snail’s pace of my own day’s work gives my observations a kind of luster. I see the shifts in light outside the window as the royal blue fills with pale grey then darkens and pours, then suddenly a bright ray pierces through. The majestic hawks, the chattering ravens and the soaring Rot Milans all dance along with the weather’s playground. My old sweet cat, Ella sleeps like a soft, black snoring stone nearby.

It has been a long time to come to this moment, a long way to discovering ever more how to slow my pace enough to feel what is arising within me and around me. It is the wisdom of the depth of my breath in my belly and the weight of my metatarsals and calcaneus on the earth. It is the wisdom of the sun ebbing ever higher in the sky toward solstice. It is the reaching tendrils of the peas along their trellises. It is the witness inside me which calls out softly to warn me when I grip too tight or move ahead far too fast beyond myself, leaving me behind.

Many of us have a tendency to leave ourselves behind. We all likely know what it feels like when our mind jumps ahead to a dreamed reality and we miss out completely on what is magic in a quiet mundane moment or in the weight of our loved one’s hand in our own. We might feel the sense that we push past ourselves when we cannot see beyond “mistakes” of our colleagues or partners or children or our selves toward the benefits or opportunities that lie therein, or else the space to let go. Or perhaps we can relate when the perceived negativity of an experience propels us into tightening around a dis-belief that we are better off in some unnamed future, crystallizing ourselves around an imagined contentedness that continuously slips through fixated fingers. We push ourselves to fit more into each moment and we sink our teeth far too often into worlds that have nothing to do with our own: other people’s golden lives filled with travels or jokes or sad stories. There are intimate moments between humans to take this kind of sharing into our hearts from those we love, but these days we often take it all in alone. In the palm of our hand from anyone with a camera and a voice.

We leave ourselves behind when we push forward too hard and push for the sake of pushing. Without any sense of the beauty and purpose of pausing or slowing down.

We find ourselves cramming our life into a crack where the light could otherwise shine in.

We find ourselves rushing to the edge of a cliff where we could, in another iteration, choose to pause to witness the vista.

We leave ourselves behind as we attempt to digest the cultural call to multi-task, to fit more into less time, to optimize and maximize and become ever more like the artificial entities at each of our fingertips.

But we are not artificial.

We are like the rain and the sun on a wild summer day. We are like the royal hawk who waits still and silent in her tree, scanning the fields for the scurrying of mice. We have the capacity to listen, to feel, to see, to pause.

To pause.

I feel the drive in myself as well. It has taken a lot of deliberate intention to rewire my impulses and rechart the course I step into each morning that I wake and breathe down into my belly, saying hello to my body and life for another gift of a day. There is an inner fight that still rages in me sometimes with the parts of me that identified intimately with accomplishing and winning and maximizing my time and my accolades and who and what I am. I was that New York City Success Story and then that Zürich Success Story and then that Returned New Yorker, and then… and then the pandemic hit and we all had no choice but to slow down. At some point I realized in that great Pause that the stories that I tried to be and that I told were never enough.

And then as I began to drop the need to push and puff up my time and my story, somewhere in the last six years I realized that actually it is not really about me. In the great pauses I began to offer myself, I started to feel that I was riding on the waves of something much greater than me alone.

A lot has happened in this last year, so much that I just did not have the time or desire to write a word. A lot of beauty and a lot of heartache. And through it all, there has been a gentle call within me that I have allowed myself to listen to most of the time:

“Slow down. There is nowhere to get to but here.”
“No need to push. Everything will arrive in its time.”

This call seems to be very powerful and it grows in its intensity as I recognize the weight of it and what it has taught me to feel, to see, to uncover and unravel in myself. I have observed it transform the bodies and minds of my students. And I have observed it transform my relationships and my perspectives. Even despite the parts of me that still fight it at times, its power grows. And the more I allow it, the more it shares its wisdom.

I am inspired to keep sharing this message in words and most primarily in practice forms. We are arriving out of the first cohort of a year-long process of guiding practitioners toward slowing down in their bodies toward a deeper understanding of themselves, their structures, and their capacity for self-awareness and self-directed profound change, If you are interested at all in learning more about these practices, please find more info here, or reach out here.