The Net that Holds Us
The Art of Slowing Down
Hello You,
Grab a coffee, get cosy, I hope these words can find you in a moment of gentleness.
How wild. How wild to remove our own humanities from our days, our own personhood from our lives. How wild for the primary gearing of our lives to be anything other than ourselves. How wild for us to learn to treat ourselves, ask things of ourselves in ways we wouldn’t in our wildest dreams imagine treating anyone else.
I’m a season of doing this summer, and as I move between my few pots on the stove, the amusing irony of old habits is making itself known to me. The very familiar desire to push myself just a bit further, do just a bit more, blur some boundaries I’ve built over the years.
But what is also making itself known are the softer shifts. The cushioning on hard days. The longer breaks. The gentler mornings. The long showers, sometime quick mi-day ones that let me return to my body. The many feel good summer drinks. The many, almost unseen, systems of care to fall on, embedded into my days. Done enough times, they start to feel as familiar as the old habits. The repeated coming back to, “What do I need today”?
The silent growing. The shift towards a framing of life that puts on the forefront my wellbeing, my capacity, me energy.
“How can I make this kinder to myself”, is a question I now come back to often, many times a week, many times a day.
Earlier this year, I took a long break. I’d been feeling tired the months leading up to it, and craving some space to breathe, reorient, untether from time and do nothing. I imagined the break would feeling refreshing, energising, lots of other nice things.
It actually felt terrible.
The moment I got room to breathe and look at the life I was living, what showed itself was my fatigue, a deadness I was living with, The more time and space I had, the more desperately I clung to it, and the more I realised HOW much was missing from the actual life I was living. Space, joy, rest, room to breathe.
After spending all of February coming face to face with the despair of all the things that were not working, what surfaced was the need to pivot to an entirely different way of life, a shift in values; a kinder life, weaving joy, rest and slowness into my days, instead of waiting for the exhaustion driven one month off and hope to find it there, or bench it till the next vacation, or the next Eid break.
The past few months, and really years, have been about learning, sometimes failing, trying again, to put my humanity before my productivity. To learn that I am more, bigger than the work I do. To shifting, in little moments, moments I felt restless with the systems I’d created for myself, moments I started to notice the rhythms of my energy, and lean into the, moments when I moved away from how “others” were doing what I did, and try to listen to what felt right for me. A collapsing, surfacing, coming together, final push towards a shift.
From this place of silent growing, I have created my workshop The Art of Slowing Down: A three part Anti-Hustle workshop on Cultivating Slowness and Presence.
In a world that has taught us that our needs, wants, desires, bodies, are inconveniences, getting in the way of getting life done, and in systems that have raised us to tie our worths to how well we hustle, how well we disregard our selves, this workshop, is meant to be a coming home to ourselves. It’s my way of saying, there is another way of moving through a life, one that isn’t based on extractive, exploitative ways of relating with ourselves. One that is built with ample room for each of our unique needs, that feels joyous, restful, easeful.
The Art of Slowing Down is about building systems of slowness, rest and care that let us pivot the way our life feels, weaving the net that holds us compassionately on our hard days, that lets us crawl back to ourselves with ease when there is little room for much other than surviving, that lets us ground ourselves in face of a world that is constantly trying to shrink us back into cruel little boxes of disregarding ourselves.
It’s about the little things, that bring the big changes in how your life feels today. If you would like to create a gentler, slower, more compassionate life for yourselves, I would love to welcome you to The Art of Slowing Down.
This is for you if:
You are exhausted by the pace of your life (maybe your soul feels like it’s dying slowly?)
Know hustle culture isn’t working for you, want a different pace of life, but don’t know how to get out of it.
You dread your day-to-day. Each day feels long, exhausting, never-ending and joyless.
You feel the urge to escape your current life because it looks nothing like you want it to. Or maybe it doesnt look like what you wanted it to, but that isn’t bringing you the joy you thought it would.
You keep deferring joyful and restful things, till after you’ve achieved the next promotion, or finished this project, or become financially secure (or even retirement?).
Registrations for The Art of Slowing Down close on Sunday, 16th July.
I’m offering several financially accessible options, if neither of them work for you, drop me a message. No one returned for a lack of funds.
If you have any questions, drop me an email at hello@ayammamohsin.com, or reach out on instagram @themessofbeinghuman. I’d love to see you there.
!