Photo by Alice Triquet on Unsplash
The slow pace was natural, like the air. I’d catch myself thinking, “I read two books.” Part of me wanted to downplay it, as if
rest needed to be earned to count, but even that small noticing mattered. Awareness doesn’t ask to be impressive. It only asks to be noticed.
Nature surrounded me, and I let it. I breathed in the trees, smelled the lake, and simply being outside slowed me without effort. I didn’t scroll. I let most things wait. Three emails mattered. Everything else could simply be.
One afternoon, I found a cozy spot by the window, mountains ahead, the lake catching light, the trees framing it like something being held rather than owned. I took a bite of salmon, and let myself stay there, in that one bite, before reaching for the next. The birds moved. The water moved. I did not.
Forty-five minutes passed before I noticed time at all. I woke when I woke. I showed up fully to yoga, to qigong, not performing presence, just being in it. The real teaching wasn’t a lesson I could carry home and repeat. It was quieter than that: eat slowly. Notice what’s already here. Listen to birds, to rain, to the space between one moment and the next.
At Kripalu, slowness wasn’t something I practiced. It simply arrived, the way breath arrives, unbidden. I didn’t build it. I received it.
Now that I’m home, slowness asks something different of me. It isn’t given here, it has to be chosen, again and again. Some mornings I hear the birds and sit down with my food like I mean it. Other mornings, the noise gets in first, and I eat without noticing. I begin again. It stings a little, that presence doesn’t stay on its own the way it did there, but perhaps that’s the practice itself: not staying present forever, just returning, endlessly, to now.
I don’t know if this will still be true in October. But I remember what it felt like when slowness came without asking. So I keep listening for it here, not chasing it, just leaving room for it to arrive again.
