There is nothing that needs to get done!

I used to be afraid to slow down, but I didn't know it consciously. I meditated and spent a lot of time in silence. So it made no sense to me that I was afraid to slow down. But on this deep nervous system level I was terrified of this inner stillness. I didn't know what would happen, or who I would be, if I wasn't doing something (even meditation was "doing" something).

One summer day when I was 25 the depth of this fear and the pattern of always being busy really hit me. That beautiful summer day in the Pacific Northwest town of Bellingham WA, I was puttering around my apartment cleaning and doing other "necessary" stuff. I remember looking out the window at the luminous blue sky and feeling the warm breeze roll in through the open window. I remember thinking how I should really just stop all my chores right then and go swimming down at Locust Lane Beach, one of my favorite swim spots, but I just had "so much that I needed to get done."

Sound familiar to anyone reading this?

Almost 20 years later I can honestly say that in my 300 sq ft studio which took all of 15 minutes to clean, there was very little that needed to "get done". But my nervous system, which had used busyness as a way of keeping myself safe in my developmental years, was still learning that I would be okay if I just went to the beach. Though my logical mind knew differently, my nervous system really believed I needed to keep doing things in order to be okay. At the age of 25, even though I was already meditating daily, going to therapy, and diving head first into my healing work, I was still light years away from understanding how my childhood trauma compelled me to keep doing, doing, doing. I had no idea yet that I was trying to keep myself from feeling all the deep pain, grief and fear that I did not yet have the full capacity to feel.

In the almost 2 decades since that sunny day, I have been slowly learning to slow down in a way that allows me to fee safe. I have learned to be present with the pain and grief. I have learned to be.