Slowing Down and Attuning to Our Bodies

Earlier this year, I experienced an unmooring injury and a transformative healing journey. I want to share this with you, as it revealed a new way of living and an altered relationship to the body and the world.

It began with a breach of boundaries. I worked with a trainer who pushed me past my limits, telling me to ignore my pain and keep going. I trusted his knowledge over the signals of my body until everything came to a halt. I began waking up every night with excruciating pain radiating down my shoulders and arms. My hands became weak and everything felt heavy to the point that I could barely lift a plastic fork to eat. For several months, I lost the use of my hands and was unable to pick anything up. My mother had to feed me and help me bathe in an unreal return to childhood where I rediscovered the tenderness of maternal love.

What happened remains a mystery. My scans showed no visible damage. The physical therapists I sought help from gave me exercises that exacerbated the injury. Their goal was to fix the body as fast as possible, an approach to healing that had a kind of aggression. I found myself in intense pain and at a loss for where to turn to. Finally, my mother intervened. She gave me massages each day, rubbing warm camphor oil into my arms, her eyes closed, her hands sensing her way into releasing the tight knots. As the weeks went by, the cramping slowly subsided as my taut muscles loosened to the safety of her touch. 

After months of searching, my mother found a hand therapist who taught me to meet my body where it was at. When I told her my fingers would swell whenever I picked anything up, she guessed that my nervous system had gone into a hyper-vigilant state and asked me to touch soft surfaces to desensitize the triggers. “Start with silk,” she said. So I did. I began closing my eyes and running my hands across the smooth fabric of a silk cloth. I walked around my parents garden, touching flower petals and the velvety surfaces of leaves. Slowly, my hands relaxed into the sensations. Safety and pleasure returned to tactility. It was the first flash of recognition of the power of softness to heal.

In the months that followed, through many twists and turns, my hands and arms began to recover. I discovered through this process a counterintuitive thing: it was not effort but rest and attunement that rebuilt the strength. After many relapses that followed my attempts to rush my recovery, I recalled something I knew from writing: states of flow come from a relaxed state. When you stop pushing and trying to get somewhere, words flow in an effortless, emergent way. I asked myself: could this process also work for my body?

I began attuning to the felt sense of ease and relaxation and made that the ground from which all my activities were done. A new relationship between stillness and movement began to form in my life. I shifted my focus from getting things done to maintaining a state of flow. This meant breaking tasks down and doing tiny amounts with long pauses in between. My days began to take a spacious, restful arc where I learned to take time to tune into my body and sense what was needed. What began as a sheer necessity to avoid injury became a practice of savoring stillness.

This slowness has a strange kind of power. When we slow down, we begin to see where our actions come from, what motivates them, and where we end up compromising our needs for things that don’t serve us. We see clearly what we were unable to see before. In the slowness, we can find alignment with what is actually needed, moment by moment, and let go of excessive effort. Paradoxically, the more I acknowledged the current limits of my body and moved within them, those limits began to lift. I began to realize that capacity can be built from a rested state. Through this attunement and the love of my family and an incredible collective of friends who helped me every step of the way, life has regained a sense of normalcy and joy.

I wanted to tell you about this experience, as I often encounter through my coaching the depth of stress and burnout people experience from internal and external pressures to move fast. I see a collective yearning to stop rushing and a collective fear of slowing down. I share my journey because it has shown me how one could move and act in a soft, gentle way without pushing past one’s limits and how much can be built and rebuilt from a place of rest. This gentleness, I found, has tremendous potential: when you are faced with something that feels insurmountable, sometimes you have to start with silk.