Slowing down is a medicine.

Would you like to slow down? I might help. Yes, really.

Not because I am a magician but simply because I practice slowness. A lot.

We all have our hobbies and apparently my favourite one is to be slow. Not all the time and in everything, like when I ride a motorbike, well, I like speed and acceleration. A lot.

But when it comes to touching the body – and mind and soul… – of a human being I indulge in slowness. I become slow.

During the past decade or so, slowness gradually became my medicine.

Partly… it just keeps me sane. As opposed to our environment that is predominantly about speed, stimulation, „ASAP” – the extremity of the slowness I embody throughout my bodywork sessions is just enough to keep me in a balanced place overall in my life.

The pace with which I work is not „normal”. It is pretty much light years away from the normal speed or the rhythm of our current culture but also from that of most bodywork modalities.

Partly… slowness gives me a view of the inner and outer landscape of anyone lying on my massage table that I haven’t seen before. And I guess most of us, including professionals, don’t see this, and not because one need some superpowers for it – you just simply can’t see this if you are in a rush.

Just like when you are riding or driving – you can’t see too much of the countryside, now can you? Distant shapes and forms and colours, some trees for a few seconds but you obviously can’t listen to the song of a bird, or observe a squirrel running up on a branch, or spotting out how a river carries a funny object with its current.

The same way, if you move on the surface of the body, you just simply can’t “see” what the shapes and forms and colours hide of this human landscape… unless you slow down.

And just as you can decide to have a walk in the same territory where you have previously just been rushing through, you can also decide to wonder on the surface of the body with a view changing slowness.

It has pretty much nothing to do with your background, skills, life circumstances, beliefs, actual mood – changing the pace of your motion will shift your perception.

With a kind, cheeky smile on my face I could say that it hasn’t even got anything to do with spirituality and all that… it is elementary school physics.

If you slow down, your perception will change.

It is not “up to you”. You don’t have to work on it. Neither is it under your control. It will just happen.

What is up to you though is… to make up your mind whether you’d like to slow down or not. Yes, the decision or setting the intention is under your control. Not that it will automatically work out then, still, knowing if you would like to slow down or not – is your call.

And it is also possible that you are happy with the pace of how things happen inside and around you – if this is the case, enjoy the ride J

If you do would like to slow down – then I might help you.

I have been slowing down in what I do for quite a while now. I walk the talk.
Embodying the slowness I am referring to became a medicine that I take – or it takes me… – pretty much every day.
Dearing to say that I might “help”, in a way is no more audacious or surprising as if I would have practiced raking leafs in gardens for 10 years, or working out in the gym 5 days a week, or playing the piano since I was a teenager… and I’d like to share the experience I have about it.

Whatever we practice for long time, well, it just naturally becomes part of our self-expression and shows up in our body, words, behaviours in various ways that are an inevitable reflections of our practice.

In my case – I just LOVE being slow during bodywork.

So how does it help you slowing down?

Despite all the scientific background and results of various researches in the field of the body-mind relationship, about mirror neurons in the brain or the link between the stimulation of the skin and the release of oxytocin into the blood stream…  – I might tell you about all that another day… – my simplest answer would be to say: I don’t know.

But I see it happening on a daily basis.

I see it in the eyes of my clients opening them again after a session, I can hear it in how the rhythm of their breathing changes and I can feel it in the tone of their muscles softening.

Visible and tangible results of how a system reacts when it encounters slowness:

… it just slows down.

And the best part?

There is nothing you would need to do about it.

Your “job” was to decide to come.

Once you are lying there, there is literally nothing for you to do.
I could say, well, maybe keep on breathing… but actually you are not “doing” that either, just as you are not doing it now neither when you’re reading this. It is just happening, just as digestion and many other things just happen by themselves.

So once you brought your body there and lied down, all there rest for you is – to rest…

… and let me do the rest.

I will be there, present, listening with my whole body, moving slowly, consciously connecting to your body, whispering soundlessly: “Welcome home”.