Find Your Slow Lane.

Are you able to find your slow lane?

Read that again slowly.

Overwhelm, burnout, and depression seem normal in a world that values speed and busyness. What might happen when we opt to slow down?

Theatre-making practices in Asia showed me that intentional slow movements disrupt unconscious patterns. We see the world as we are. Habitual ways of perceiving and being tend not to change when moving through the dance of life in familiar ways. By changing how we experience things, we shift our perspectives, resulting in more choices for how we act.

I learned a powerful lesson years ago, during my training with Yoshito Ohno, son of butoh co-founder and legendary performer, Kazuo Ohno. Butoh, a contemporary and avant-garde theatre genre, teaches focused presence and meticulously slow movements. In the studio, on the outskirts of Tokyo one day, a talented dancer was struggling with an exercise involving slowing down each movement. As she moved across the space, the teacher asked her to slow down. He repeated this request multiple times, and in her attempts to integrate this into her movements, she twitched and shook, unable to dance more slowly.

It was surprising to see how the dancer’s habit of moving prevented her from exploring a slower strategy. Yoshito-sensei recommended that she learn and practice Noh, a six-hundred-year-old Japanese theatre form with a slow, coded style. Noh, he suggested, would help her disrupt and renew her ingrained tendencies.

Noh is the oldest living form of theatre in the world, with all its elements codified through slow and deliberate movements, chants and ancient dances. Unlike Noh, however, butoh is formless, and the slow movements organically emerge. There is a balance is to be found between freedom and form.

Yoshito-sensei emphasized that changing ‘the dance’ requires a different aesthetic approach to movement. I understood this to mean that we need different inputs and inspirations to make meaningful change. In this sense, slowing down is a renewal strategy. By disrupting our default patterns of movement, we create new possibilities in both our bodies and our minds.

My personal practice of slowing down, often supported by slow movement and sensory mindfulness, helps me manage my stress and busyness. With awareness of my tendencies, I can make different choices, enhancing a sense of well-being and creative calm. Once I attain these more sustainable states, I can then reload with focused energy.

Practice experiencing your life more slowly to experiment. Even if only a few intentional minutes every day, move, walk, think, laugh, witness, listen, act, sense, and respond more slowly. A great tip is to use your breath to help you slow down, by noticing your slowing breath. These curious acts of experiencing can counterbalance the negative effects of our rushed lives. In conducting these experiments, you may feel strange with the unfamiliar, and if others are around you, even self-conscious. Yet, this strangeness is an ally, helping you understand that another way is possible.

A practice of slowing down enables you to access this experience when you need it, and in that range of pace we find choice. The alternative is to stay the course and maintain the unsustainable stress and overwhelmed states that so many of us experience. A proposed remedy is to slow down to restore, and then fire up again with purpose. Slowing down does not undermine speeding up, but rather expands the range of movement between these two experiences, building neural flexibility.

While slowness may seem counterproductive, the opposite is true. In our fast-paced world, consistency beats intensity. Intense bursts of busyness, without slower respites, may contribute to stress and burnout. This constriction of our ability to self-regulate also stifles creative flow. Slowness might be a key to reclaiming our wellness. It facilitates embodied neurological re-patterning, leading to fresh, flexible, and new ways of being.

A slow strategy nurtures responsiveness and reflection, calm and creativity, connection and collaboration. These are all foundational elements for sustainable consistency. Intentional slowness is empowering, practical, and refreshing. It transcends time, gives direction to bursts of pace, and can profoundly affect our well-being. Slowing down enables us to optimize our creative mind and body, to move decisively and with purpose.

So, consider moving into your slow lane a little more often and begin practicing a different dance.

Once you learn and practice slowing down, you will have that choice available to you.

The choice to slow down.

*Curious to explore how you can develop and integrate a slower strategy in your personal life, creative work, or collaborations?

Connect with me for a conversation.