ASAP – As. Slow. As. Possible.

How to go beyond the slowing down cliché and actually make it an embodied reality?

Most of you have probably bumped into this age-old graffiti: “Please stop the world, I want to get out!”

In other words, the yearning for a Big Pause — for things somehow slowing down, for this whole experience called life somehow becoming less intense — is nothing new.

Yet it seems that, as a collective, we are not particularly successful at slowing down.

Somehow, on an individual level, we all think it would be a good idea to slow down. 

But when it comes to our culture or society operating at a certain pace… well, there are no signs of humankind actually slowing down. 

On the contrary.

Why is that?

I don’t have an answer to how all this started, but clearly, we have a collective momentum by now where the desired change won’t come from just talking about slowing down. It is not enough.

You have to do it.

Which, funnily enough, means the opposite of doing.

Slowing down comes partly from doing things more slowly, 

partly from doing less, 

and most powerfully: from the lack of doing — from being.

Which, in our society, is almost considered a sin. Or laziness.

Doing nothing, being bored, just wandering around, sitting or lying pointlessly, and in general not knowing what to do next… we’ve basically forgotten how to “do” all that.

So however silly it sounds, in a way we have to learn — or remind ourselves — how to… well, not how to do it but how not to do it.

How to just be — and be at peace with just being, without doing something.

Rather similarly to the now-trendy digital detox retreats, we could also say that we need to have some productivity detox times and retreats as well.

In a way, we truly are addicted to productivity.

And coming off this addiction can be scary.

We have various reasons to be busy, productive, active — and some of these reasons are healthy; 

they’re simply us being creative, expressing ourselves, or taking care of others.

Some of our reasons, on the other hand, are just excuses, cover-up stories, conditionings.

In my decade-long journey of slowing down, I’ve had many waves of realization about how there is a price to fast life, but also — and this is really important if you’d like to slow down — there is a price to slow life as well.

As long as you can’t create a balance or equation where the benefits of slowing down outweigh what you will — and you will — miss out on, your subconscious resistance to slowing down will not allow you to actually slow down.

Without clarity, it will remain this ongoing, never-ending yearning — wishful thinking that somehow, accidentally… never becomes an embodied reality.

Now, how does all this relate to my passion: providing and teaching others the radically slow version of Lomi Lomi?

Earlier this year, I actually coined this expression: Lomi Lohi — lohi simply meaning “slow” in Hawaiian.

Whether given or received, a Lomi Lohi session is a template or a taster of a direct experience where slowing down immediately results in feeling good. Period.

It is a cause-and-effect connection: the more you slow down, the more the thing is enjoyable.

You rush — no good.

You slow down — it feels good.

The impact of slow moves is sometimes so powerful that people drop into a deeper sense of relaxation by the time I glide down with my two hands from their neck to their lower back.

I do take my time: this little half-meter journey sometimes takes an entire minute, and the recognition of the soothing, calming impulses takes place within seconds — so the shift for the parasympathetic nervous system to take over is immediate and effortless.

If you marinate long enough in the simplicity of the above binary equation, your body, your mind, your entire system gradually start to realise and embrace that it’s worth slowing down — because the reward is right there. The gratification and satisfaction happen on the spot, with no delay. And the process is trustworthy, almost like gravity…

No matter what your original mood is, what kind of thoughts you have, or how you feel in your body — the slower the moves, the better the experience.

As this new realization sinks deeper and deeper, after a while you become capable of extending the intention and the actual slowing down beyond the framework of a Lomi Lohi session — into your life.

Life, looked at through and experienced with a down-regulated nervous system… well, it just makes everything easier.

It will not necessarily or magically make challenges or conflicts disappear, but in a way it partly becomes easier to cope with them — and partly, a range of them will simply no longer be perceived as challenging or conflicting.

If I won the jackpot one of my first moves would be to offer more sessions and events for free, simply because the belief and trust during the past years got so strong that it is my deepest wish to share it with as many people as possible.