Subject 13: Slow Living
Often the pace of our society and culture can be triggering to our nervous system and energy field. We are tempted and prompted to always be on, to always be going, to always be scrolling, to always be doing, and to always be reacting. Living at such a pace is out of alignment with our true nature, and it causes imbalances, unsettledness, and a lack of true fulfillment.
Settling for a life that doesn't serve us energetically or on a soul level will not be tolerated from here on out. Fist pump + deep exhale!!
Slow living is about nurturing yourself and your life deeper, working towards balance, wholeness, and healing, and knowing how to live a more engaged, present, intentional, full, and organic life. This will be our focus in this video.
Slow Living
In this class we journey into the path of Slow Living. Not only is this another way of being in the world, it’s also a therapeutic and cathartic way of living. You don’t have to live a rushed and fast pace life, if that’s not what serves you on a soul level. Slow living offers us another way of being in the world.
Notes
Mentioned in the video:
The world, as we know it, is moving at its fastest pace yet. As we are expected through society's pressure to keep up with it, our mind, body, and soul are standing in protest.
We have to keep in mind what may not be our own best pace and rhythm. There’s a growing need to slow down and balance our lives and to tend to our nervous system and soul with greater depth, wisdom, and presence.
Opting for a simpler and more organic way of life: mind, body, soul, lifestyle, career, and nutritional.
Our lives don’t have to be an industrial machine that’s constantly pumping out the next best thing to keep up with the trends and the current times. How exhausting is it when we live this way of life? And how unhealthy is it on our nervous system and body, mind, and soul, let alone the impact on our personal relationships and our spirit life?
Slowing living is about putting more energy into the things that you have right now around you and strengthening these aspects of your life with deeper presence.
Slow Living Is About:Living with greater awareness and intention.
Taking time to nourish, tend to, and listen to your inner world.
Being more present and becoming a beacon because of that.
Preserving longstanding family and cultural values regarding the quality of family life, eating, leisure time, spirit life, and lifestyle.
Knowing how to be present with any extra time you have and not always seeking to fill with busyness or distraction.
Taking moments to pause, check in with yourself, and reflect on your day, your thoughts, your well-being, your heart, soul, body, and mind.
Living with poise and gracefulness that a rushed life often lacks due to holding a high stress vibration.
The Problem With Fast Living
Back-to-back busyness leads to self-neglect, stress, anxiety, an unbalanced life, and even sickness.
The disruption of our nervous systems, balance, and our natural, authentic rhythms.
There’s the guilt thing. You feel guilty for taking the time you need. You take on other people’s projections and timing.
There can be a shameful narrative around a slower life. Not allowing others to shame us for slowing down our lives as needed and living at a different pace is how we live unbothered. Success may look, feel, and manifest differently for you.
Living out of focus. We too often focus our attention on the collective world and what others are doing, our own greatness and inner-treasures become out of focus.
Negative pressure and impact. This outer focus can influence the pace of our own lives, and as a result, we adopt and adapt to begin busier, doing more, going more, taking on more, creating more, more, more, and faster.
This fast-paced life can happen to the extent that we begin to compare and undervalue our lives, which often leads to low self-worth, self-esteem issues, and rat-race culture.
Moving to fast can be reflected in living a life where you’re focusing so much on what you don’t have that you neglect and devalue what you do have.
We’re all here to be the hero of our lives, but on somedays, being our own hero simply means slowing down.
The simple act of preparing and drinking a cup of herbal tea is a soothing slow ritual in itself. This is particularly helpful when using nervine herbs for stress relief, relaxation, grounding restoration, and insomnia.
The Benefits of Slow Living
It allows us to be fully present while creating more awareness, deeper meaning, and connection in life
You’re tuned into a deeper way to living and spirit space
You live from a deeper place of poise, balance, and grace
This way of living transports you to a parallel universe. While this world is off doing its busyness in all the ways it does, you’re off enjoying your life and really being present with it
When slow eating, you have better digestion, better well-being, better brain function, and better-tasting foods and drinks
Due to living a less distracted life, slowing down allows you the space for higher insights to come through and for deeper and fuller spiritual connections and experiences, hence why mediation is so powerful
Slow living is much like living your life in meditation. Everything becomes a meditation. You’re more focused and present in all you do, create, encounter, and are
How To Begin Slow Living
Engaging in activities that are emotionally and physically grounding and fulfilling to you.
This could be:
Disconnecting from the digital world
Working on a project really you love
Reading a book
Napping
Spending time in nature
Taking a walk, run, or hike
Gardening
Grounding
Sunbathing
Playing with your child or inner child
Slow cooking and slow eating
Taking baths
Sitting around as a family or as community and engaging in fellowshipping, laughing, and having real conversations. Listen deeper. Be more present
Pacing your process in each season. Not rushing it
Inviting in more flow
Journeying in grace
2. Implementing more self-care, spirit care, and soul care.
3. Being mindful of your breath: Breath is life. Slow breaths for more poise, strength, and grace.
4. Nervous system care. Ease into your day and tasks without rushing and activating the sympathetic nervous system and stress response.
5. Areas to engage with more awareness, presence, and intention: spirit, mind, body, health, home, eating, cleaning, organizing, relationships, work, communication, parenting, creating, and community.
6. Have patience in lines and public places, drive slower, have genuine conversations, long or short, with strangers, offer to serve others with a joyful heart.
7. Set a daily intention to slow down and slow-live.
8. Slow food movement minded. Knowing where your food comes from when possible. Cooking with mindfulness, love, and intention at home. Eating local, shopping at farmers markets when you can, eating organic, natural in season, and in peace. Avoiding foods with harmful chemicals and stimulants that disrupt your natural energy flow, rhythms, health, and well-being. Read food labels.
Alice Waters’ philosophy on slow food and eating. Posted at the Edible Schoolyard at Martin Luther King Middle School in Berkeley, CA. Credit: Jason Henry
9. Reinerating, preparing healing foods, and cooking slowly with love, gratitude, positive intention, and greater focus. Not cooking or eating distracted. Not cooking and rushing. Intentional, loving meals feel differently in the body.
10. Eating with thanks for the food, meal, or drink you have, for who prepared it, and for where it came from.
11. Eat slower and connect to the spirit, energy, and essence of the food, herbs, intentions, and elements that made it.
12. Eating and living with greater joy, connection, and community.
Introspection:
Are you present in the day-to-day actions and interactions of your life?
Where can you engage with more presence, intentionality, awareness, slowness, and heightened connection in your life?
What therapeutically slows you down and makes you feel like you again?
Are you enjoying all that you are and have now?
Reflection:
Much of what you have now is what you desired enough to manifest into your reality.
Sometimes, gratitude looks like being more present with what we already have. This, in contrast to overworking to manifest and overlooking our blessings, is a great way to manifest.
Affirmation
I am not a machine.
I am a human being, and I now give myself permission to live, love, do, go, and create at a pace that is best for my soul’s wholeness and well-being.
Breathwork and Meditation Divinely Slow Us Down
You can find my guided meditations here at VHD and over on the Insight Timer App.
You can find classes online or locally in most towns. My dear friend Ashley Neese is a master teacher of breathwork and the author of How to Breath. AshelyNesse.com | IG: @AshleyNeese
