The Slow and Aware Approach Applied
Community-building through co-regulation
Fostering individual and social transformation through embodied safety.
The perspectives below are glimpses into how a simple, relational practice — slowing down together — can support growth across education, healthcare, leadership, research, and community life.
Some of these projects are already unfolding; others are seeds for the coming decades, perhaps even for future generations to begin. Together they point to places where embodied presence, co-regulation, and conscious touch might bring more joy, clarity, and connectedness.
Each perspective is an invitation into a future that moves at a more human pace.
ADHD/Autism
Slow & Aware offers neurodivergent individuals a way to experience co-regulation within a supportive community. We’ve had inspiring and promising encounters with both adult members and their children through slow and aware (multi-handed) touch. Apparently, through gentle touch, attunement, and embodied pacing, many neurodivergent people discover a felt sense of safety that softens overwhelm, deepens connection, and creates space for more easeful relating in daily life.
Body-dysmorphia
Our approach invites people with body-related anxieties into a slow, compassionate re-meeting with their physical selves.
Through 1-on-1 or multi-handed presence and steady nervous system support, clients often experience moments of neutrality or even tenderness toward their own bodies — a gentle step into acceptance and a renewed sense of belonging to themselves.
Education ('Tactile Intelligence')
We imagine an education system that honours the body as a primary source of wisdom.
Tactile intelligence introduces co-regulation, touch literacy, and embodied presence into learning environments, helping children and young adults develop physical and emotional awareness and resilience, and a grounded connection to themselves and others.
Elevated Tourism
('Travel From the Inside Out')
Imagine travelling not to escape your life, but to drop deeper into it. Elevated Tourism pairs beautiful locations with gentle, multi-handed Lomi-inspired sessions woven into each day. As the group co-regulates and enters naturally altered states of awareness — without substances — the world becomes more vivid and spacious. Historic sites, nature reserves, and simple daily moments are experienced from a more attuned, elevated state of mind. It’s travel that nourishes the nervous system, connects the participants on a deeper level and opens the senses, turning a trip into a quiet inner adventure.
The way Forward
These are beginnings.
We are listening, learning, and trusting the magic that keeps showing up — the synchronicities, the timing, the way the right people appear at the right moment.
If any of these perspectives resonate and you feel moved to get involved, we’d love to hear from you.
You might be the key that helps the next step appear...
Hospice
Slow & Aware can support people in their final chapter with dignity, presence, and deep human connection.
Through the soft, steady touch, the dying - and their families - experience a calmer nervous system, a sense of being held, and moments of profound peace that can create space for acceptance and leaving the body in loving awareness when the time has come.
Entheogens
Collaboration with leading psychedelic researchers — including Dr. Rosalind Watts, Dr. Chris Timmermann, and Dr. Carl Hayden Smith — has shown how strongly the Slow & Aware approach complements altered-state work. Our ceremonial massages offer a natural, safe, legal pathway into expanded awareness, often mirroring the qualities of entheogenic experiences. As policy evolves, we hope to explore how gentle, slow and attuned touch can support grounding, emotional clarity, and embodied integration before, during, and after responsibly held psychedelic sessions.
Silence
Silence is at the centre of the Slow & Aware approach. Some of us offer sessions and workshops where there is no talk at all.
Everything is arranged beforehand, so when you arrive, all you do is lie down and receive — and if you wish, you can even leave without saying “bye” or “thank you.”
Some of our workshops and courses unfold in quiet between modules and exercises, with no music during the sessions and we speak only during the sharing circles.
Prisons
This project explores how embodied presence, co-regulation, and therapeutic touch might support rehabilitation in an environment shaped by strict no-touch policies. Inspired by Vipassana programs and teachers like Eckhart Tolle bringing mindfulness into prisons, we envision a carefully adapted, trauma-aware version of our work. With the consultancy of Gábor Roszík — former MP and board member of Prison Fellowship International — we aim to develop a model that helps restore dignity, broaden perspective, and deepen connectedness for both residents and staff.
Sensuality
We want to reclaim an innocence in how we relate to our bodies and create spaces where body-awareness, slowness, and safety form the ground from which healthy, non-performative sensual expression can naturally emerge.
This exploration invites us into the awakening of the senses - to embrace the subtle, joyful felt sense of being alive in one’s own body.
Insomnia
By calming the deeper layers of the nervous system, this practice helps people with sleep difficulties rediscover trust in rest. Gentle touch and co-regulation remind the body how to surrender.
We can’t promise outcomes — yet we also don’t shy away from sharing that some clients with long-term insomnia have, after just a few hours of Lomi Lohi, experienced deep, uneventful sleep the same night, sometimes for the first time in years.
We can’t promise outcomes — yet we also don’t shy away from sharing that some clients with long-term insomnia have, after just a few hours of Lomi Lohi, experienced deep, uneventful sleep the same night, sometimes for the first time in years.
Trauma healing
Drawing inspiration from pioneers such as Staci Haines, Gabor Mate, Daniel Siegel or the NeuroAffective Relational Model, Slow & Aware creates the conditions for trauma to unwind gently through the body, mind and soul.
We are in the process of creating collaborations to explore how safety, slowness, and multi-handed support can help clients access new patterns of regulation and embodied resilience.
We are in the process of creating collaborations to explore how safety, slowness, and multi-handed support can help clients access new patterns of regulation and embodied resilience.
Free NHS prescriptions
In partnership with Gaia CIC, we envision Lomi Lomi sessions becoming a future complementary option within NHS social prescribing — a modality that reduces stress, builds resilience, and supports nervous system regulation. We are currently gathering the necessary evidence through questionnaires to enter the NHS decision-making process.
Research
We are in early conversation with researchers at Imperial and King’s College to explore scientific study pathways related to C-tactile fibres, endogenous DMT production, co-regulation, and the neurophysiology of this work. The long-term vision is to build a rigorous evidence base for Slow & Aware as an emerging collective therapeutic modality.