Hello, and welcome back to practicing human, the podcast where every day we're getting a little better at life.

I'm your host, Corey Muscarra, and in today's episode, we're going to talk about the importance of slowing down.

More to come on that in a moment.

First, let's settle in together with the sound of the bells.

So, when it comes to your own healing and growth, slowing down is often necessary to go faster, or at the very least to make any sort of meaningful change.

The reason for this is that a lot of our habitual patterns of reactivity that keep us stuck in the same sorts of trauma responses,

conditioning that are related to childhood self, or just keep us in loops of self-sabotage, preventing us from moving toward other stages of growth, are happening very quickly and often unconsciously.

In fact, we often don't even realize that they're negative patterns. They just feel like how we relate to the world.

And if we try to go through our healing and growth with a ra ra pump me up mentality, well, it may give us a certain positive emotion and energy that inspires us to take a certain action in a positive way, and so all of that can be good.

But what we can miss are those patterns that are still there that are keeping us bound to other loops, other behaviors, ways of responding that are actually going to sabotage any sort of growth we might have gotten from that positive emotion, or just keep us stuck in where we were before.

And to really get a sense of those, in my experience and with those I've worked with, just requires getting slow enough so that you can be attuned to your moment-to-moment experience.

And when I say slow, it doesn't mean that you have to slow down all of your emotions and feel like you're moving in slow motion, although you certainly can, and at least in a monastery or retreat setting, you have the opportunity to do that, and it can be quite powerful.

I mean more, just being a little slower in your being, as opposed to that more jumpy mind that's going, oh, now this, now this, now this, now this, oh, time to grow, yeah, positive, cool, new habits, yeah, growth, growth, growth.

Right, it's like a positive orientation, but it's very quick, and it's not going to be able to perceive these moments where somebody says something to you,

and it creates a thought that triggers a feeling of shame, that then creates a defensive response that then causes you to say something, like that can happen so fast.

And if we don't catch it, it just feels like, oh, of course that's how I would respond in this situation, but we're not following all the different layers of what was happening there.

Something was said, it triggered a thought in the mind that triggered a feeling, and that feeling triggered another feeling which triggered an action, and then, and then that led to the situational folding as it did, and you know that all can happen very quickly without any awareness.

But if we're making the intention to really be attuned to, okay, what am I thinking right now? What am I feeling right now?

How are my thoughts and my emotions interacting? And we just make that a key part of our awareness.

Well, we're going to catch those moments much more easily, and we're going to see how the mind and the body are interacting with our moment-to-moment experience throughout the day in a way that we probably often missing.

And when we miss those interactions, well, we are destined to repeat them.

And so going slower, just simply making the intention to be aware of, oh, what am I thinking in this moment?

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