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

Today the rains come in alternating 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, but each phase has its own fervor; the rain like giant wet walls and curtains, the golden sun kissing the air with his high summer heat each time he breaks through.

The snail’s pace of my own movements along the course of this day gives my observations a kind of aging patina. I inhale to pause from writing and watch 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 the stony sky. In a study break I tiptoe to the window as the majestic Mäusebussards, chattering Rabens (Ravens) and the soaring Rotmilans all dance along with the weather’s playground. All through the afternoon my old sweet cat, Ella, sleeps nearby like a soft, black, snuffling stone.

It seems I am wired to pay attention to details, but it has been a long time and a lot of undoing to arrive at a way of scanning for and uncovering the innumerable minutiae of life that exerts less pressure in its process. It has been a long way to discovering ever more how to slow my pace enough to feel what is arising within me and around me without strangling or smothering it away, or else knowing when I might zoom out and take in the greater landscape of it all.

All of this is still in process but the change is marked. My path toward more ease has been paved with the wisdom that sits in the depth of the 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.

At some point, I became so familiar with leaving myself behind that I forgot there might be another way. I have a sense this might be true for most of us. Somewhere along the way we forgot what it was to sit with the blades of grass or the marching line of ants, watching in wonder, waiting in boredom. We forgot how to allow in the magnitudes of summer breezes or beads of sweat to kiss our necks, taking in the slowness of it all and not needing to fill in the gaps with a single thing.

As I reflect back over the last decades of our modern life that gradually and then ever more rapidly became more sealed off from boredom and the slow wanderings of certain moments or hours or days I wonder: what is in this strange recipe we have created which seems to press us far beyond ourselves?

a fleeting moment at Magazzino in Cold Spring, NY - Summer 2023

We all likely know what it feels like when our mind jumps ahead to a dreamed reality and we miss what is magic in a quiet mundane moment or in the potent weight of our loved one’s hand in our own. Or perhaps we can relate to the negative perception of an experience which propels us into tightening around a dis-belief that we are better off in some imagined future. We may understand what it feels like to crystallize ourselves around a contentedness that continuously slips through fixated fingers. And we surely know what it is to attempt to fit more into each moment, like stuffing sand into a pillowcase whose seam is unraveling. After all the effort we still find ourselves deflated and formless, wondering where the time has gone and what we sacrificed along the way toward this beautiful empty shell.

And now, since more than ten years many of us (most of us?) wander perhaps far too often into worlds that have nothing to do with our own and which seem to flatten and dull and sometimes poison our experience: watching other people live their lives filled with travels or jokes or sad stories through the LED glow of a screen. It seems to land in us often with the pang of judgement and/or coveting and the diffuse ache of loneliness. And it holds us there, somehow trapped between the glowing spectacle and the absurdity.

There are intimate moments between humans to take this kind of sharing into our hearts. I remember flipping through photo albums with my Grammy, the crackling of plastic protecting the captured moments in Europe or Hawaii, the sticky dots on each page slowly browning with age. Each turn of a page was a story to tell. But these days we often take it all in alone, with almost no accompanying story but the one in our own mind. Imagine something that once was a precious thing to be traded between lovers or family or friends now becomes entertainment for masses of strangers with nowhere to put their tear-stained cheeks or hollowed-out eyes or empty palms? Imagine that in the attempt to fill the vacancy in our spirit, we just created bigger fault lines?

While the screen scrolls by under our fingertips, the trajectory of our technological moment appears to assure that our dreams, our meanderings and perfect mistakes, our heavy pauses and moments of stillness all but disappear. As we attempt to digest the cultural call for mass optimization of everything including our own health, we find ourselves measuring and cramming our life into the last cracks where the light yearns to shine in. We push to fit more into less time, to enhance 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 go crazy. To be still. To pause. To pause…

To wait and see.

I feel this drive in myself to constantly forge ahead still very strong at times, although I have worked hard to begin to extract it. It has taken a lot of deliberate intention to rewire my impulses and rechart the course I step into each morning where I wake and breathe down into my belly, saying hello to my body and life for another gift of a day. There is still an inner tug-of-war within the parts of me that identified intimately with accomplishing and winning and maximizing my time and my accolades and who and what I am. Even now as I write these words across the page I dig down into the decades-old chest of my “successes” with an urge to find something to pull out and show the world. But I know now that in the showing there is mostly just a reflection outward but not so much back in. And I have grown tired of the way this kind of projecting binds me toward needing a response from outside of myself, when the feedback I know to be most vital is the whisper that my heart speaks.

I gradually become more accustomed to waiting. To observing. To allowing. I become more adept at catching myself in the old patterns of pushing and gripping and forcing. And asking them to step aside. It helps to feel my ribs expand. It helps to hear the birds and to watch the grasshopper climb her tiny tower of wheat. It helps to remind myself what I love most in this life and saturate myself in that knowing for even a few slow minutes.

And through it all I have begun to realize that actually it is not really about me anyway. In the great pauses I begin to offer myself, I feel that I am riding on the waves of something much greater than me alone.

I see that the magic of slowing down is impossible to dictate or to tell like a story. It is only to be felt. Teachers and mystics and prophets have asked us to look in the direction they are sitting; they have sought for us to make great efforts to be still long enough until we start to feel the weight and wisdom of waiting.

This is the first I have written a word in nine months. So much has happened in this last year and every time I sat down to try to push myself to create something, there was nothing arising from the tap. I was not empty but there was nothing left over to share. Our family went through a lot of beauty and a lot of heartache. We moved for the umpteenth time and we created a home almost from scratch. We lost our dear cat and best friend, Jack. We said goodbye and hello many times over. My studies took over my life at times, often in wonderful ways. Other times I just wanted to saturate in our family. And through it all, rather than to keep pushing, I tried to wait and listen. And the message that arose was always like this:

“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 and my perceptions. 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.

***

A note on practical applications: I am inspired to keep sharing this message in words but 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, All of this is built on the foundation of waiting and allowing toward wisdom. If you are interested at all in learning more about these practices, please find more info here, or reach out here.

The Weight, the Wisdom of Waiting

Equinox: Release, Conserve