Tag: Slowing Down

Slow Dance Back to Sleep

(Title image: Photo by Preillumination SeTh on Unsplash)

I haven’t been sleeping well lately.

It’s not that I’m actively worried about anything. In fact, I’m now in one of my least stressed periods in recent history and some things that I have been working on for years are reaching resolution. But there’s a lot moving through my mind, and although I can usually suppress those thoughts during the day, they seem to emerge at night.

Especially when I naturally rouse in the wee hours of the morning.

Especially when my husband may be quietly snoring just loud enough to lift me into a lighter stage of sleep so I break the surface into consciousness again.

And then scenarios run amuck. Not even negative ones, but just a burst of possibilities and stories.

The only “stressful” part is that it’s 3am and I am not sleeping.

I have to force myself to pull back on the cinema, deliberately and consciously pushing myself into a calmer state.

And the way I do it is this: first, I notice my breathing. At this time of the night, I often find my breath rapid and shallow, so I make an effort to slow and deepen my inhales and exhales. That helps bring my energy levels down.

I don’t even try to eliminate the stories in my head. That would be futile and require more force than I can muster in the darkness.

But what I can do is work with my imagination. Whatever scenario is playing out, I slow it down. If someone is speaking, their words slow. Movements slow down. Things are still “happening” but their pace starts dragging.

The whoosing of activity decelerates. Perhaps I imagine people sitting down. Raised voices lower and words get drawn out. The overall picture turns golden and fuzzy.

It’s like playing my thoughts on an old-timey movie projector. Popcorn optional.
(Photo by Noom Peerapong on Unsplash)

I envision this as a “sleeping kingdom” situation, where the energy drops to a lower state for everyone there. After all, this is my imagination, my world, and, I remind myself, I get to call the shots, even at 3am in the morning.

This kind of slowness becomes a blanket, covering everything. And as the “slumbery” feeling takes over, it deprives thoughts of their fangs and claws, the ones that have taken hold of me and carried me away.

Even my busy and interesting thoughts lose their electric attraction, more easily slipping out of my mind’s grasp and languidly swimming away, kind of like a roly poly manatee. No sharp turns or other quick movements. Just a gradual retreat into the corners of my mind.

This is a truce between myself and my brain: okay, you’re gonna play movies for me in the middle of the night? Fine. I’m just going to modify them a little bit.

And at 3am this slowed pace gently releases my mind as I drift back to sleep.

Stepping Off and Slowing Down

During a recent mindfulness retreat, we did a walking meditation outside.

The idea was simple: walk slowly, as if taking steps for the very first time. Sense how it feels to shift all your weight onto one foot as you lift the other, then extend that lifted leg, place that foot down and shift weight onto it as you lift the other leg. Rarely do we slow down enough and realize how complex a movement that is, we’ve been doing it for so long.

As I walked along the paved path, I moved fluidly. There was nothing in my way and the pavement was flat. Perfect to move me along even though I was taking extra care with my steps.

But as I came up to the lawn and stepped off the path onto the grass, I sensed a change in my movement. The lawn was bumpier, clover blossoms all around with honeybees that I wanted to avoid. My steps slowed even more as I trod gingerly.

The living, growing lawn required more balance and called for increased attention to what I was doing.

Ah, those man-made paths…getting us to where we need to be.

As I made my way through this walking meditation, I was intrigued by how my experience differed between the two surfaces. Our human-constructed paths are designed to get us places and purposefully point us in the direction that we must go. The hard pavement requires less thought about balance and it is usually clear of hidden obstructions. As a result, we pay less attention to what we’re doing in the moment and more to replaying scenes from the past or what’s to come in the future. We whiz through, perhaps arriving at our destination with little memory of how we got there.

Once in a while, get off the path, enjoy the journey and see where you end up.

But the grassy blanket laid down by nature gently commands us to observe the journey. That path has many possibilities and sometimes we don’t know exactly how we will travel when we set out. We give it more thought as we progress, perhaps changing direction several times, but being aware of the reasons for doing so. We may arrive at our destination with a fresh mind and greater appreciation of the journey.

Certainly, we cannot always leave the paved path. We have responsibilities that must be met and those may require efficient travel in the shortest time possible. But what a shame if we never take the opportunity to wander off and slow down our pace, delighting in where we are right now.