Happy Wednesday, Reader 💜
What’s your relationship like with action and urgency?
Moving about the world with intention is coupled with a giant sense of urgency for me. Once I have something in mind, it feels like I must move to it quickly and with vigor. But. How we move through the world contributes to how we experience life and how regulated we feel inside.
Constantly feeling hurried creates stress in our bodies that’s unnecessary and just piles on more atop other stress sources. Cortisol and adrenaline are great for what they are intended to do, but it’s harmful to sip from those fountains every second. Our bodies are not designed for that.
There’s so much I want to say here about how hurriedness and false urgency impacts our lives, but to keep this succinct, just think about how you treat people when you’re in a hurry. It’s usually not kind or patient or empathetic. You’re more likely to run off what David Foster Wallace labeled as your “default setting.” In these moments, you become detrimentally self-centric. It feels like everyone else is inconveniencing you and is to blame for slowing you down — like the whole world is out to get you — and that just revs your survival mode engine even more.
The good news is that you don’t have to live like that. You get to choose to slow down and turn off the default setting. Chipping away at the habit of urgency requires consistency and practice outside of the activated moments.
A while ago I had a practice where I would purposefully take time to rest for at about 10 minutes in the middle of the day. I loved the idea of this practice, but after some time it felt restrictive because I didn’t always want to rest. That phrasing didn’t give me the space to do whatever I needed during that time.
I found the phrasing I needed the other day when I happened upon this Two-Minute Meditation (Doing No - Thing) by Nicholas "Quazzy" Herd on InsightTimer. It’s a short, fresh meditation that gave me the juice to rekindle a midday practice, but this time to do no specific thing.
The first day, I set a time for 2 very accessible minutes and just sat in the middle of my livingroom floor. The rules: (1) don’t get up; and (2) let whatever happens happen. So I sat there and one of my cats came over, and I pet her without urgency until she’d had enough and left, and then I just sat there until the timer went off.
Pretty boring story, right? Pretty awesome.
I unplugged for a brief 2 minutes, and it felt wildly unwild. I didn’t stress about how much time it would take or getting behind on tasks or feeling like I had to do any particular thing. It felt strange and novel, and completely unhurried.
It’s amazing what can happen in such a short time when your intention is to fully divorce yourself from urgency. My shoulders felt lower, my breath felt deeper, I felt more cognitively refreshed, and I felt more gentle in my spirit. In two minutes. All this without conscious effort.
I’m curious to see what happens as I continue to experiment with this practice, and I’d like to urge you to find a way to experiment with it. Where can you make time to practice not being hurried?
You don’t have do nothing to explore unhurrying. If setting a couple minutes aside doesn’t work for you, find some inspiration in this Coffee Meditation that’s only 3 minutes and a great listen as you prep some coffee or tea. Turn on some calming jams as you shower. See what works.
With slow and tender vibes,
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Welcome to Zenful Mindings
I'm Brianne, a trauma-informed yoga & somatics facilitator, mindfulness advocate, and Master Reiki practitioner. I'm passionate about body literacy and mindfulness because connection with our bodies creates a kinder world, gentler states of being, and harmony with our surroundings.
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