I needed a day off and I took it. My wife and I got overnight babysitting and decided to go up to Boulder and meet up with some friends and spent the night just the two of us at a "fancy" hotel. I did check my work email a bit too much in the morning. I did it while she went through every lane at Target looking for Christmas gifts. I couldn’t help myself. I still feel guilty when I leave work knowing others have to pick up the slack while I’m gone. Or is it that I must be in the know? I find myself thinking way too much about work issues. I don’t yet know how to disengage from a job that I have held for so many years. It will be unsettling to watch others make the decisions I would normally make but it is best for everyone that I learn to let go. It is so difficult for me to slow down at work and it all starts with the speed of my thinking.
Most of my decisions are made in an impulsive fashion, mainly because I have made most of my decisions before. When you work at a job that is cyclical (having a start term every 5-8 weeks), you tend to come across similar challenges and thus have a reference point in making decisions. I don’t waste any time and need to keep on moving. The drawback is that this quick thinking and rhythm can cause tension in the body, energy depletion as well as stifle creativity and freedom. Learning to slow down my thinking is essential to cultivating intuition.
When I was in graduate school studying to be an actor, I was teaching Oral Interpretation of Literature. I had a student with a pronounced stuttering problem and I was unsure whether I could help him. The assignment was William Shakespeare’s Sonnet #18:
Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?
Thou art more lovely and more temperate.
Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,
And summer's lease hath all too short a date.
Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines,
And often is his gold complexion dimmed;
And every fair from fair sometime declines,
By chance, or nature's changing course untrimmed.
But thy eternal summer shall not fade
Nor lose possession of that fair thou ow'st;
Nor shall death brag thou wand'rest in his shade,
When in eternal lines to time thou grow'st,
So long as men can breathe or eyes can see,
So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.
It was quickly apparent that this student was not able to get through the first sentence without stuttering and was getting frustrated in front of the class. I have no experience in Speech Pathology so consciously I had no idea how to help him. I decided to listen to my intuition and try some "out of the box" coaching. Something told me that his speech impediment was stemming from the speed of his thinking and a connection to his breathing pattern.
“I’m going to ask you to connect each word with an image in your mind. Don’t tell me what the image is just let it come to mind and sit with it. Let’s take the word “shall”. When you have the image clear in your mind, take a deep breath and exhale saying “shall”. He did. “Now let’s do the same with the word “I”. “What does “I” mean to you? Now take a deep breath and exhale saying “I”. No problem. We went on in similar fashion with every word in the first sentence. “Shall”, “I”, ‘Compare”, “thee”, “to”, “a”, “summer's”, “day”. Then we stringed the sentence together in one breath. No stuttering! The class applauded. His eyes lit up.
“We are going to spend the rest of the class slowing down your thinking and breathing, drinking in each word with the meaning that resonates with you. With your experiences.” At the end of the class, he went through the whole Sonnet without stuttering once. He had never done that before and it brought tears to this 18 year-old’s eyes.
Being conscious of our breathing patterns as we move from thought to thought is a great way to allow room for intuition to enter. The simple act of breath awareness slows our thinking and it is in the space between thoughts that higher wisdom reveals itself to us. Suddenly a thought appears that just “feels” right. It has no tension or fear associated with it. It comes from a deeper place. Some have called this place “the gut” and you possess a sense of certainty that there is truth behind the thought.
I have found that asking myself throughout the day “how am I breathing?” automatically changes my rhythm. It is the same principle found in Quantum Physics: The act of observation, changes that which is being observed.
You don’t have to force a slowing down process, just become aware of the breath. Your body knows what to do next.
If you cannot think of one magic moment that happened today in which you connected with another human being, then you might be breathing, moving and thinking too fast. Not to worry though. You can always slow down before going to bed or when taking the dog for a walk. Noticing after the fact is the next best thing. The moment is waiting for us to catch up to it or we just need to slow down enough to let it catch up with us.
I’d like to end with a great story about the moment everything changed for Helen Keller who was deaf and blind. Can you notice how much she slows down her thinking and makes room for the experience of happiness?
“Miss Fuller’s method was this: she passed my hand lightly over her face, and let me feel the position of her tongue and lips when she made a sound. I was eager to imitate every motion and in an hour had learned six elements of speech: M,P,A,S,T,I. Miss Fuller gave me eleven lessons in all. I shall never forget the surprise and delight I felt when I uttered my first connected sentence, “It is warm.” True, they were broken and stammering syllabus; but they were human speech. My soul, conscious of new strength, came out of bondage, and was reaching through those broken symbols of speech to all knowledge and all faith. No deaf child who has earnestly tried to speak the words which he has never heard- to come out of the prison of silence, no tone of love, no song of bird, no strain of music ever pierces the stillness- can forget the thrill of surprise, the joy of discovery which came over him when he uttered his first word. Only such a one can appreciate the eagerness with which I talked to my toys, to stones, trees, birds and dumb animals, or the delight I felt when at my call, Mildred ran to me or my dogs obeyed my commands. It is an unspeakable boon to me to be able to speak in winged words that need no interpretation. As I talked, happy thoughts fluttered up out of my words that might perhaps have struggled in vain to escape my fingers.”- From “The Story of my Life” by Helen Keller- Bantam Dell
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