Stop rushing, and slow down please

Hello, it’s been a while since I’ve written. I believe there are chapters for offering ideas outward, and chapters for living them quietly. Chapters for building, and chapters for being built. There are chapters for analyzing & understanding, and chapters for living and observing. Chapters for moving, and chapters for being moved.

I’ve been in a chapter of listening more than sharing, but now the year is turning and something wants to be spoken.

Last month I found myself accepting a last-minute waitlist opening at Esalen for a somatic dance workshop on the edge of the wild Big Sur cliffs. Twenty-four hours to get there. Five days alone in the woods, in the creek, in the baths, and on the dance floor. I spent the week moving, listening, soaking and feeling. We’re so often in dialogue with our minds, but how often do we listen to our bodies?

I’m referring to the deep listening. The kind where all you hear at first is a whisper or a quickening, a little tingle, and if you stay with it. If you breathe with it, dance with it, it unfurls. A thread appears. A conversation that may have been inaccessible for years becomes clear.

It felt like magic to arrive alone. Big. Scary. Magic. Winding along the cliffside roads through Big Sur in some truly cinematic fog. Trust brought me to Esalen; trust carried me through it. This is a place built for seeking, for healing. The conversation the dance brought forward was not an easy one to have with myself. But I listened and I learned.

I learned to be present in my body. To feel at home. To find strength inside tenderness.

There is something transformative about spending quiet time alone. There’s space to experience a profound shift when your phone doesn’t work and your usual identities can’t follow you.

There was deep aloneness, and also there was community. The pas de deux between solitude and togetherness, the way our lives braid into one another whether we realize it or not. We are never just ourselves. And yet we need to be with ourselves, too.

That’s where the magic lives: in the dance between the two.

As winter solstice approaches, I’ve been noticing this duality everywhere.

Storms rolled through Big Sur the entire week I was there, and instead of resisting them, I let them set the tempo. I’ve always believed that the best work (and living) comes from a blend of inner knowing and precise craft. Intuition and expertise. Softness and strength. Darkness and light. There it is again, the dance.

Lately I’ve felt pulled toward slowness. A different tempo than my usual dance floor. I’ve been creating intentional stillness in the middle of the holiday shuffle. Having a daily conversation with the part of me that loves to accomplish things. I’m rushing less. I feel clearer, more deliberate. Lingering where it feels good: in the sun, in bed, inside a book, on the dance floor.

The dance at Esalen turned up the dial on my sensitivity, my ability to listen, it encouraged me to trust that being still doesn’t diminish me. It strengthens me.

To stand motionless in the center of a room while fifty people swirl, leap, and spin around you, each in their own rhythm…that is a crash course in embodied trust. In courage. In clarity.

So I’m moving slowly into my vision for the year ahead. That’s part of the vision itself:

SLOW DOWN.

Slowness is thoughtfulness.

Slowness is listening.

Slowness is a strategy.

Slowness leads to creative prosperity.

That’s the dance I’m choosing.

I’m writing to you from my patio in Manhattan Beach. It’s a clear winter morning; the ocean is a deep blue. The horizon is crisp, which I’ve learned isn’t always the case. Two years of watching the water. Two years, the longest I’ve lived anywhere in a while. The most I’ve slowed down. The most I’ve listened. Waking up to the ocean every morning has made an incredible shift in my life, one that is still slowly unfolding.

This month also marks five years of working outside corporate life, and just over a year of writing to you about it. I’ve moved slowly, yes, but I’ve moved intentionally. I set out to be playful, curious, and adventurous. To see what I could build, who I could learn from, and how life might unfold if I trusted my own inner resonance more than a fully-baked plan.

Recently, on a planning call for a friend’s gathering I’m helping bring to life, someone described the island where we’ll meet as: unique, small, inconvenient.

Those three words lit me up. They are a source of slowness. There is a special kind of creative frequency that lives on these unique, small, inconvenient islands. Contained yet expansive, easily felt. I’m carving out time to return to that this year.

Planning space for creative prosperity is as important to me as planning revenue. The two are intertwined. They move together.

Right now, it’s the quiet rituals that hold me, and are encouraging creative thought to flow. It’s the unique, small, inconvenient space that’s created while savoring my morning coffee, journaling, admiring each sunset and moving my body in ways that feel devotional, not performative.

I’m learning that life opens most fully when I let both sides lead in their own time, the stillness and the motion, the seeking and the surrender. Each part shaping the rhythm of who I’m becoming.

If you’re also craving slowness, or a little courage, or a return to your own body, I hope something in here meets you where you are.