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 Mascara, 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, conditionings that are related to a 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 rah-rah 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 motions and feel like you're moving in slow motion, although you certainly

can. And at least in a monastery or a retreat setting,

you have the opportunity to do that, and it can be quite powerful.

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