Needs Reflection Practice
“When we are with our own needs, we are no longer needy. We are in integrity with our own heart.” – John Wineland
This is a reflection practice to help you learn more about your relationship with your own needs, hopes, and desires in your relationship—how they live in you, how you relate with them, how you express them (or not) with your partner, or others in your life.
 
If the word needs doesn’t connect for you, feel free to use other language such as “important experiences, values, what matters to me.” Write for a few minutes using the prompts below. Repeat each prompt at least several times, feeling and listening for further or deeper responses each time you complete a sentence. After a few min drawing on your own responses, feel free to take a look at a list of needs to get other language or ideas such as: www.nycnvc.org/needs to see if any resonate with you. 
 
Prompts:
 
In our relationship (or in relationships in general)
 
I want…
I need…
It really is important to me to feel…
Reflecting on how you relate with your needs: 
On a scale from 1 – 10, 1 being hardly at all, 10 being most of the time:
 
How much do you accept that you have these needs, value and respect them as important, as mattering?
 
How much of the time, and how openly do you express, ask for these needs with your partner or others?
 
How much do you hope or expect your partner to know about these needs without communicating them (i.e. mindread)?
 
When your partner doesn’t meet your needs (either because you haven’t expressed them, or because you’ve asked for something and they can’t or won’t), what meanings do you make? How do you interpret the experience of not having your needs met? What feelings go with that interpretation?
 
This practice is adapted and expanded from Making Great Relationships by Rick Hanson

Woody Allen had a cheeky line. “You have two choices in life, you can be single and be miserable or get married and wish you were dead.”
 
Beneath the grimness of the joke is a truth about every choice we make involving some kind of inescapable pain or loss. We easily cling to the fantasy that there’s a choice that can bypass disappointment, but the deeper truth is that no matter which path we choose we have to  choose what kind of loss and  disappointment to live with.
 
There’s an African proverb that frames this inevitable limitation in the context of  our mortality as human beings. It says: '"If we go forward, we die; if we go backward, we die. So let's go forward and die." Every big or difficult choice is a kind of death—it asks us to let go of something we don’t want to let go of. When faced with difficult decisions, we’re all tempted to search for a path forward without a tradeoff, a way free of loss. We have deep hard-wiring to avoid pain.
 
Commitment and Sacrifice
 
When we think about the places where we get stuck, or the pain points where we struggle, there's often this experience of "I don't like my choices," or, "I don't like either of these two choices." These moments of being between a rock and a hard place can feel intolerable and claustrophobic--they can haunt us or feel like they're going to destroy us.
 
They might ask us to grow in any number of ways, but generally speaking there are two skills that are part of the craft of being a mature human being involved in these choice points: commitment and sacrifice.
 
A commitment is a stronger, deeper, longer-term yes to someone or something or some place that asks us to sacrifice all the other things we won’t be able to have in order to stay with that one person or one place or one thing.
 
Big life decisions like committing to a long-term relationship, ending a relationship, starting a new job, or deciding to move, or to have a child, force us to confront the losses inherent in every choice. We go one way, and in doing so we don’t get to experience what was down the other path—or even know for sure what we might be missing.
 
This is the essence of a dilemma –a difficult choice has to be made between two or more alternatives, either of which asks us to face our fears, and to grow in challenging ways.
 
I’ll give a few examples to illustrate : A couple wants to decide if they are moving forward into the future together as life partners, but they have dramatically different feelings about becoming parents. One is much more drawn to it, the other has strong reservations. In order to choose each other, or not choose each other, choose parenthood or not choose parenthood, they have to journey through this difference, their inner conflicts about each choice. No matter what decision they make, they will have to face uncertainty and sacrifice.
 
Someone gets a once in a lifetime job opportunity that would require them to relocate. The move would take them away from a community of friends and family whom they love and who sustains them. Either road presents tremendous rewards and heartbreaking losses. There’s no detour around the hard stuff--no simple gratification without sacrifice.
 
There’s no way around these life choices being difficult. But there is a way that having a meaningful context in which to hold them makes the process easier. Understanding, accepting, and even valuing how we are asked to let go of some paths in the process of choosing others is essential. This is the principle of sacrifice.
 
Sacrifice

Sacrifice is loss with purpose. A sacrifice is a choice to let go of one thing to stay connected to something that is more important--a deeper value, purpose, or love. Sacrifice is the act of choosing—with all its blessings and hardships-- made sacred, which is to say made more beautiful or meaningful in some way. When our choices are made within a larger story that has some coherence, a shape that makes sense to us, our losses are ennobled and our suffering is given a worthwhile direction.
 
This is why regarding transformation and growth as a sacred process can make all the difference between feeling like we are the victims of chaos, or feeling like we are the hero in a story that contains dignity and beauty.
 
What are some of the containers, structures, and forms that help people face suffering and transformation as a sacred process?
 
Traditional religion. Ideas of sacrifice of different kinds are woven through most religious traditions to give people a sense of purpose and meaning as they orient to life, and especially to suffering. Jesus dying on the cross, the Buddha leaving his palatial home to embark on an inner journey that called him, or the archetype of selfless service exemplified by Mother Theresa are a few examples.
 
Any clear system of values serves the same purpose. When people get more clear on what’s important to them, it helps them make sense of the sacrifices inherent in growing.
 
A mythological sensibility. This means connecting to one’s life as a story. Stories have struggle, and they have chaos, but they have some organizing aesthetic quality that imbues the hardship with meaning and purpose.
 
Community and Ritual. Rituals are experiences that create an external expression of the tensions, emotions, and invisible transformations we undergo internally. Importantly they include the community, so that our individual, internal transformation is witnessed and affirmed by the collective—giving it value, dignity, and context within community it otherwise might not have.
 
Rites of passage is an enactment of this truth—we deliberately go through something that is extremely challenging and asks us to surrender to what we are leaving behind in order to enter into a new phase of life, a new form of being. The milestones within a human lifespan are punctuated by rites of passage. Physical birth, the enormous changes throughout childhood, the particular transition of adolescence between childhood and adulthood, the identity shifts that come with middle life such as becoming a parent or living through changes in vocation or relationships, and of course the enormous transitions of elderhood and death which bring with them both suffering and unique blessings.
 
Here is how the poet David Whyte describes the choice we have about how we hold and make sense of our experiences of loss:
 
“The only choice we have as we mature is how we inhabit our vulnerability, how we become larger and more courageous and more compassionate through our intimacy with disappearance, our choice is to inhabit vulnerability as generous citizens of loss, robustly and fully, or conversely, as misers and complainers, reluctant and fearful, always at the gates of existence, but never bravely and completely attempting to enter, never wanting to risk ourselves, never walking fully through the door.” (From: Consolations: The Solace, Nourishment and Underlying Meaning of Everyday Words)
 
In closing, here is a simple practice you might try the next time you’re find yourself “between two fires” in a decision you have to make:
 
Notice how in making decisions, we often ask ourselves the questions: “What is the right decision? Or what is the best decision? Try shifting the questions you ask to: “Which sacrifices do I choose to make here, and why? What values or principles make the sacrifices I choose to make meaningful or beautiful?
 
And finally, a poem by Wendell Berry:

Our Work

It may be that when we no longer know what to do
we have come to our real work,
and that when we no longer know which way to go
we have come to our real journey.
The mind that is not baffled is not employed.
The impeded stream is the one that sings.

 
When faced with difference or conflict, it’s very easy to get tunnel vision about our individual agenda. If we’ve never had the experience of negotiating through a difficult decision with another person, we tend to assume that the only way not to lose is to win. The power over rather than power with paradigm infuses most modern cultures—from families to organizations.
 
Remembering and repeating to yourself inwardly “work on the problem not on each other” can return you to a collaborative mindset that allows for more complexity so that two (or more) different experiences can be included in a decision making process without anyone feeling burned, abandoned, or overpowered.
 
A “problem” here is any topic or situation that asks you to arrive at some kind of shared understanding, decision, or plan.
 
You have to decide where to send your kid to school, but you don’t agree; one person wants more sex, the other isn’t as into it—how will you work with this together?; you have different hopes about the holidays and have to make your thanksgiving plans—where will you go, and how will you get through the meal so you end up feeling good together?
 
Working the problem means you position yourselves together on the same team with the shared goal of coming to an outcome that works well enough for both of you.
 
Even though you have different perspectives, feelings, or hopes relative to the issue, you keep your eye on the fact that you want to find somewhere to land that works for both of you, and doesn’t compromise feeling fundamentally caring and connected.
 
Working the problem rather than each other means the process feels fair and just to both of you. Both people respect and try to understand and care about the feelings, perceptions, desires of the other, even if they don’t like them or agree. The outcome might not be ideal (rarely is it). It might be closer to one person’s preferences than the others and involve more disappointment for the other. But both people give and take along the way. And you land together in a place where no one’s feeling dropped, excluded, missed, or holding resentments that will fester.
 
When we work a problem rather than each other no one feels more or less important than the other. There’s a back-and-forth negotiation where nobody collapses into agreement too quickly, or gets stuck in a rigid, unmoving position. Even though things might feel tense, or intense, there is an underlying atmosphere of mutuality, respect, and cooperating to work towards a solution rather than making each other enemies.
 
When you veer off track and start working on the other person you forget you’re on the same team with a shared goal, which is coming to an agreement, a decision, a path forward that works for both for you. You argue for your goal at the expense remembering and expressing your care for your person and the relationship. You start to make your partner wrong or bad for their experience. You make each other into adversaries and you’re both left feeling frustrated, disconnected or disillusioned. The original problem remains no closer to being solved, and now you have the additional problem of feeling alienated from each other.
 
When we start to feel tugged into the habit of trying to control or change the other person in an aggressive way, we have to remember that our larger priority is to emerge from the conversation connected.  Remembering is a practice. We have to do it over and over again. There’s another saying that can be a reminder of this priority which is “act with the results in mind” (I heard this from couples therapist Jeff Pincus). Again, the practice is to notice when we’re slipping towards forgetting our deeper intention in relationship, and return our attention on the ultimate effect we want our actions to have.
 
To act with the results in mind, we have to stay in touch with the bigger picture—our larger goals for the relationship. In the immediate moment, we’re often pulled towards doing or saying something that feels easier in the short term (for example, saying something snarky or unskillful, remaining frozen or withdrawn while our partner’s dysregulation spikes). Making a different choice that acts with the results in mind will feel like letting go, which usually feels pretty uncomfortable right in the moment.
But beyond that feeling of doing something hard there’s the bigger win of feeling connected and synchronized with your most important person—of the flow of love between you not getting unnecessarily gunked up.
 
Letting go, which involves releasing our grip on something precious (being right, getting our way at the expense of the other, being understood first) is supported by breathing, especially by allowing longer, slower exhales. It’s harder to get stuck in rigid patterns if our breathing is flowing. Breathiing out intentionally helps remind our tense muscles and thoughts that it’s possible to soften, to keep moving, to stay “light on our feet” as we work the problem rather than each other.

How is between you and your technology? Do you ever feel like you have less power over your choices and habits connected to using technology than you’d like? Do you wonder about the impact your devices are having on your brain, your body, your spirit, your quality of life? 

When it comes to being conscious about how we’re shaped by our technology use, we seem to be building the plane on the runway. Our human body-minds have evolved over millions of years. The technologies we’re figuring out how to relate with came online in a relative fraction of a second of our time on this earth as a species. We don’t need to wait for experts or policies to take stock of how we’re living, and how we want to live, relative to these new technologies. I’d like to offer a few simple observations and suggestions based on my personal experience. 

While there has been increasing attention on the negative impacts of social media on our collective mental health, I believe there is a more fundamental and broadly challenging force at play that stems from the constant access we have to an endless virtual world through the internet. Regardless of the content we’re accessing, the fact that we can always access more information puts at our fingertips the never-ending option to find more, to read or hear or see or learn or be entertained by something else, to peer around one more corner. The presence of the internet constantly seduces us away from presence in our here and now. It can leave us feeling out of touch with our deeper selves, with each other, and with what’s important in life.

Even if the information we connect with on the internet is benign, or truly enriching to our spirit in some way, when we consume it at the speed and volume built into the internet, all information tends to become pornographic. That is, it’s reduced to a shallow, fast, hollowed-out version of the more paced and in-the-flesh experience we need in order to feel fulfilled in a whole being way. Our lives become flattened when we forget how to move and breathe and connect , and feel fulfilled, engaged and present in the off-screen, everyday world. 

Here are a few simple practices to try to start growing more awareness and choice with your relationship with technology.
 
1. "Home Alone”: Going somewhere where you can do without your phone for a bit? Leave it home alone! I often do this if I’m going out with my wife. There’s often no pressing need for me to have my phone in these instances. Notice how it feels to not have a device with you physically. If you want to extend this further, try taking a weeklong total technology sabbath once a year.  
 
2. “Take 5”: Each time you have an impulse to pick up your phone or open your computer, try pausing and taking 5 coherent breaths. A coherent breath is simply an inhale to the count of 5 and an exhale to the count of 5. The purpose of this is twofold: One, in pausing you create some space between your desire and your acting. This delaying of an automatic response builds muscles connected to having discipline, patience, and the capacity for delayed gratification—all skills that are essential for effective action and genuine fulfillment. Two: The conscious breathing gives you an opportunity to tune into yourself more closely. When we reach for our devices unconsciously and automatically, wemay have a need we’re not in touch with. Perhaps we need food, or connection, or movement, or to feel meaningfully engaged with a purpose or place in a different way. The 5 breaths are a chance to sink into your body sensations and physical experience, and as you do perhaps to sense if there’s a need you may reach for in the real world that will leave you feeling more fulfilled and present. 
 
3. Try this "Take Control Toolkit" from the Center for Humane Technology
 www.humanetech.com/take-control

Learning how to feel and deal with anger is an essential skill for navigating relationships. Anger gets a bad rap, and for good reasons. Out-of-control anger causes a huge amount of harm. Most of us are rightfully scared of anger because our experiences with it have mostly been negative. We haven’t had great role models who show us how to relate with anger in a way where  we can channel it’s intelligence and power effectively without causing harm. 
 
There’s definitely a place for simply containing and controlling anger so it doesn’t “burn down” lives. If your anger is a volcano that's causing harm to you need to learn basic anger management techniques to keep your cool and prevent harm. You can find some great tools for help with that work here:
www.mindyouranger.com/resources/keeping-your-cool/ 

Yet we also can’t simply erase or pretend away our anger, or any emotion, without its energy coming back to bite us in some other way. As the saying goes: “Emotions are like children. You don’t want them driving the car, but you can’t stuff them in the trunk either.”
 
There’s a way of getting to know how to feel and wield our anger so that it empowers our lives in non-harmful and life-serving ways. Here are a few ideas and tools that might be helpful as you explore anger. 
 
Get To Know Anger in Your Body
 
It’s hard to access the wisdom within anger when we can’t stay present with the physical intensity of the experience. Most of us aren’t comfortable with the sensations of anger, so we either numb out or act it out when it rises. Instead of feeling and dealing with the raw, physical intensity of anger we get tangled up in stories and demonize and blame ourselves or others.
 
The next time you’re angry, try to notice the avalanche of blaming thoughts that might be tumbling through your mind. Step back from the stories you’re telling yourself about who did what, who is wrong etc. and instead give your attention to the sensations of anger. 
 
Get curious about the felt, texture of anger in your body—the physical sensations of anger. 
Here are some common physical sensations that go with anger you might notice: 
 
heat
tight belly / solar plexus
clinched jaw 
stiff eyes 
furrowed brow / face
faster heartbeat 
breath holding or shallow
 
Stepping back from the flood of explanations for why you’re angry, and sinking down into the body of anger for a few moments can help you take responsibility for the feeling you're having. 
 
Next, we’ll look at how you can channel that energy into action that will create an outcome that results in more of what you want rather than more problems.

What’s Anger For Anyway?

Setting Boundaries
​
Your relationship with anger is closely tied to your relationship with boundaries— all of the places where you negotiate where self and other meet, interact, collide, mingle, or merge. 

Anger helps us clarify and communicate our boundaries. 

If we’re feeling angry, it may be because our boundaries are being crossed, and what we experience as anger is the process of our body-mind mobilizing to set a boundary to protect ourselves from a perceived threat. If we avoid anger habitually, we may set boundaries in indirect, passive aggressive ways which alienate other people.
 
If we don’t know what our boundaries are or how to make them known, or if they’ve been violated due to traumatic events, learning how to feel and channel anger as a clean boundary-setting force is vital and empowering. 
 
Do you know how to say no in a way that is clear and clean? If not, you might start practicing with small, less loaded situations. One intial way to do this is to start notice your preferences. 
 
If you don’t actually want to go out for pizza when you’re partner asks, and you’re in the habit of saying “maybe”, or “I don’t know,” how about simply saying a clear “no thank you” instead?” 
 
If you feel uncomfortable with how close someone is standing next to you at a party while talking to you, can you honor your body’s “no” by taking a step back? 
 
When we deny or ignore too many of our “No's” they can build up over time, eventually festering into resentment and bitterness. 
 
If you struggle to say no for fear of someone else’s response, it can be helpful to think of setting boundaries as a means to honor and protect what is important to you—whether it’s your physical space, time, energy, values, or people you love. 
 
Each time you say “no” or set a boundary, you are also at the same time saying “yes” to something you value.The more clear your “no” gets, the more wholeheartedly you can say “yes” to life. 
 
The goal with boundaries is clarity and flexibility. The threshold between ourselves and the world changes depending on context, and is ever-evolving and nuanced. The more we learn to listen to anger as a boundary-setting energy, the more free we can be to dance with others in relationship with flexibility.  
 
Next time you’re angry, you might ask yourself: what boundary is this energy trying to help me set and how could I do that clearly and cleanly? 
 
Anger as The Harbinger of Vulnerable Needs
 
Another function of anger  is to signal to us we have needs that aren’t getting met. When we feel angry, we can take it as a cue that something might be out of alignment that needs to shift to rebalance our lives. Often it’s needs that have been unmet for a while that accumulate into an angry energy (think resentment in long-term relationships!). 
 
Anger is the tip of an emotional iceberg, the surface expression of other deeper emotions that are often more vulnerable to feel than anger like sadness, fear, or shame. When we hang out with the energy of anger long enough without either imploding or exploding, we have time to sink our awareness down and get to know our more vulnerable needs. 
 
For example: Your partner comes home late and you notice you’re angry with them for not letting you know ahead of time. 

Option One: You could express your anger by blaming your partner for their actions, or leak your anger by complaining about other things not related to them coming home. 
 
Option Two: You could notice your anger, and touch the sensations of it with your gentle, curious awareness, and listen for the deeper needs beneath the surface response of anger. Maybe you were worried or scared about where your partner was, or sad because you were hoping to tell them something important from your day. With this information, you could express your need with your partner in a way that’s more likely to evoke their understanding.  
 
If we only share our anger with others, we’re likely to push them away. When we can use anger as a signal or doorway into other more vulnerable emotions, we can share our hearts in a way that invites others to come towards us and our needs. 
 
Next time you’re angry, try sinking below the surface charge of the experience and being curious about what you might be needing. Would there be a way to claim and express your need without making anyone, yourself or others, bad or wrong? 
 
Summing Up 
 
Like fire, anger has a hot, transformational potential that is powerful. Like fire, if it’s not contained and channeled, that power is destructive and chaotic. 
 
To harness the power within anger effectively, we have to remain aware of our heart — the part of us that is connected to others and to all life—while we’re angry. When we learn to feel the deeper impulses within the energy of anger, whether it’s setting a boundary or expressing a need, we can channel the intensity of anger towards accomplishing its higher purpose. We can use our anger to protect what we love and value, to stand up against falseness or lack of integrity, and to reach out for what we need.

For most of us, being in a committed, intimate relationship is one of the hardest things we can do in life. Staying in a relationship, or tolerating it, is one thing—difficult and painful in its own way. And when it comes to the challenge of staying emotionally engaged and connected with another person over time, I would say you’re in for the ride of your life.  
 
We can let go of so much unnecessary pain just by giving up the fantasy that other couples have it all together or don’t struggle. It’s a myth that we should be able to make our relationships work without help. Relationship is hard for everyone. The good news is, it is possible to get better at being in relationship.
 
But getting better isn’t only about feeling better—it also asks us to grow. Growing is inherently and unavoidably uncomfortable. But growing doesn’t need to be as hard as it is when we’re alone and isolated from connection and support in the places where we feel uncertain or scared.
 
For many people, admitting we need help feels like a sign of weakness, or even a cause for shame.
Especially for men, who are socialized to display strength even when we’re feeling scared, insecure, hurt, or sad, saying “I need help” or “We need help” feels strange, risky, even forbidden.
 
There’s still a dominant story-myth in our society that says strength is persevering alone and keeping your chin up and chest out in spite of feeling shaky inside. So it makes sense that so many of us shy away from acknowledging our need for help in an area as vulnerable as our closest relationships.

​I want all of us to be more comfortable saying these three powerful words in our relationships: 
“We need help.”
 
When in comes to emotional and relational growth, we need good support to heal and grow. As deeply social creatures it’s just the way we’re wired. There’s only so much any of us can do alone. Without support, we’re overwhelmed by emotions and act them out or tune them out instead of learning from them. It’s through sensitive, emotionally attuned relationships that we learn how to relate with emotions wisely and effectively, so that they can be energies that inform and enliven us rather than unconscious forces that cause upheaval.
 
Even though needing support is so essential and normal, so many couples remain isolated and from the help they could use finding their way through the emotionally intense and complex terrain of intimate relationships. Many couples only seek help after their relationship has withered over time, or been shattered by a betrayal of trust.
 
Imagine if all couples knew in their bones that encountering challenges in their relationship was normal rather than a symptom of failure, flawed character, or being a bad match. Imagine if instead of waiting until they were unraveling, couples said “we need help” early on, and got good support (like couples counseling) as a healthy component of self-care.
 
Despite the many messages you might have received about what you should be able to handle, there’s absolutely nothing wrong with you for feeling challenged, humbled, or at your edge in your intimate relationship. Saying “I need help” or “we need help” can be the first step towards feeling better.

It’s a brave and fierce move to stand in the vulnerability of being at your edge, and to reach out for the support that will help you grow into a new reality.

A beloved therapist I worked with in my twenties would often say a phrase to me that was a balm for me to hear: “Take your time..,” he would say, “take your time.” As you read these words, I invite you to try reading a little slower than usual. I invite you to take your time.
 
You might be reading this because you’re looking for some relief from some form of anxiety. I want to suggest that one of the simplest and easiest ways to start to soothe many forms of anxiety is to slow down, to take your time.
 
Try it. Why not start right now, right here? Reading is one of our many modern-day activities where there’s a tendency to rush ahead at a speed that leaves our bodies scrambling trying to catch up. As you read these words, you might notice if there’s any sense of rushing in the way you’re here, and play with reading more slowly. What’s it like to read at a pace where these words and ideas have time to be felt in your body, instead of just skimming across your mind? What’s it like to take your time as you read?
 
I believe that when many people report feeling anxious, that they are expressing symptoms of what I call speed-sickness. We live in a world that worships speed. Our society moves at the speed of information and digital technology, the speed of thinking, the speed of engines and economics and efficiency and productivity and growth and self-improvement. Modern life runs on technologies and values that rush us through time at a frenzied pace that forces us to disconnect from the rhythms of our bodies and our heart. We can’t continue living at this speed without eventually becoming exhausted and sick. And sometimes, anxiety is an early wake-up call to slow down.
 
While there can be many causes for feeling anxious, consider the possibility that a portion of what you identify as anxiety in your life is simply a calling from your body to slow down—a message, an invitation, from your deeper being to inhabit your moments in a way that allows you to see, touch, taste, feel, and savor life rather than always rushing ahead to a future goal. From our everyday mind’s perspective, attuning to this realm of experience can feel slow, and even threatening. From the body’s perspective this way of being is essential, ancient, and the ground of well-being.
 
So again, even right now as you’re reading, I invite you to consider taking time to let your mind settle down into the body like a flock of birds returning to a tree.
 
You might return some attention to the feel of your body sitting wherever you’re sitting. Notice how the ebb and flow of breathing feels as it changes the shape of your body with each breath.
 
Even as these words and ideas flicker across your mind, give some of your attention to the physical sensations of sitting and breathing and simply being on this vast, solid earth in this moment.
 
I have met many people who feel like life is moving too fast, and worry that something is wrong with them for not being able to keep up. Let me be a voice that says with conviction that nothing is wrong with you for feeling the need to slow down. It is the pace of mainstream, modern life that is insane, not you. The pull to slow down, and the courage to listen to it, is a radical act of sanity and caring. Here are some ideas to play with as you explore listening to this call more.

• Give yourself permission to slow down during various parts of your day. Perhaps post a note in a few places that says: “Slow”, or “It’s okay to go slow”.

 

• Explore what it's like to move at the speed of the body instead of the speed of thought?

 

• Try adjusting your pace and your attention during any activity to stay in touch with some of the sensations of being alive, like breathing and the sense of the weight of your body on the ground. You can explore this anytime (e.g. when waking up, eating, sending an email, paying for the groceries, talking to a friend or family member).

  

• Connect with animals and nature often, and let yourself savor their grounded presence as a reminder of the rhythms of your animal body (more on this in an upcoming post!).

 
 
The good news is, no matter how often you’re sucked into living speedily, and no matter how estranged you may feel from your body and heart, every moment is here waiting as an invitation to pause, to slow down, and to take your time. 

If you're looking for a supportive place to practice slowing down, that's an integral part of what I offer clients in my therapy practice! I hope you'll be in touch and we can talk more.