Podcast Episode 36: Slow Down
Introduction:
Thanks for clicking on Conversations with Crosswinds Counseling. I’m Curtis Smith and I invite you to subscribe to our podcast and to like and share it as well. I hope you enjoy today’s episode.
Podcast #36:
Curtis: Hi, everyone, and welcome to Conversations with Crosswinds Counseling. I’m your host Curtis Smith. Today, on the podcast, Steven Weaver is with us. One of the fabulous counselors here at Crosswinds Counseling. Stephen, thanks for joining us today.
Stephen: Hey, no problem.
Curtis: We’re talking about something today that I think we all want to do. We all need to do, but we probably all struggle doing – and that is slowing down. When you are counseling someone and one of the things that you notice is that they need to slow down, how do you go about helping someone to do that?
Stephen: Well, the first thing I’ve been doing is look out that window we got right here. And I’ll say look at that Mazda dealership, right. I can get a car like that. If I, you know, I don’t have to save. I don’t have to go slow. I can just get it for what I want. I get approved for a loan, and I’m out the door that day. Right. So, all I have to do is look out the door and say, ‘Hey.’ Look, our society leads us to kind of this orientation of always going fast. Then I look further down. There’s like a Popeye’s Chicken. I can get a chicken sandwich really fast. As fast as I want. Like within a couple seconds, but that doesn’t take time. It doesn’t take slowing down to say, ‘Is this healthy?’ ‘Is this going to benefit my life?’ ‘What is really going on here below the surface? So, I kind of like start with that overall societal view of we are just bombarded with fastness in our life. Right. And it’s hard to get away from.
Curtis: It’s not how society used to be too. So, I assume I think we all kind of have something internal at times that makes us want to go faster than we should. Society feeds that problem when it didn’t used to. So, you point these things out. Look outside the window. Here are some ways that society is impacting you. Forcing you to go faster and faster.
Stephen: Right.
Curtis: So with that external pressure, not even just the internal pressure, but with the external pressure that society puts on us, how do you get someone to stop, take a breath? Slow down and then process through things the way they’d rather do it?
Stephen: Well, the process becomes instead of externalizing, which is what a lot of people do. We externally try to take care of everyone in our life. We’ve got all these things. We’ve got the job. We’ve got kids. We’ve got, you know, we’re in a couple relationship. We’ve got our boss, and we’re always trying to take care and put out fires outside of us, and the process becomes going back inside. Which if you think about it, a lot of different philosophies, even Christianity, Jesus, the taoists, Lao Tzu said, “Relinquish what is without. Cultivate what is within.” Live for your center and not your senses.
So, this is a process of saying, ‘What are the things that could work for you to slow down, but also go inside.’ So, I know for me, some of the really great things are I – this Monday I did a float tank. Totally, like disconnected from the world around me. Total darkness. There’s a little bit of – I liked a little bit of music, but that helped me just get in the process of slowing down. There’s not one thing that is going to get you to slow down. You’ve got to keep at it like a practice. Like soccer practice. You’ve got to do it as much as possible in order to get out of that habit of always having to like ‘Go. Go. Go. Go. Go.’ Really fast.
Curtis: I think I, even not being a counselor, I think I could come up with some – a list of some good benefits to slowing down, but from a counseling perspective what do you think the benefits are? Why should people want to slow down? Because I think a lot of times, maybe we don’t even want to do that. We don’t embrace what we know we should do. Why should we do it?
Stephen: Okay let me put it in the context of, I do a lot of couple counseling. And couples are trying to fix their relationship really really quickly. What is the right thing to say? What is, you know, the proper words? How should I be in this relationship? So when we slow down in a relationship, we can become more conscious of what is really going on. What, for example are my needs in this relationship? Rather than, a lot of guys, they tell me this phrase, and it really is one of the triggers for me. You know what I’m going to say. Right?
Curtis: Maybe. Say it.
Stephen: ‘Happy wife. Happy life.’
Curtis: Yes.
Stephen: Right. And that is just, okay, here’s a strategy for placating someone outside of me rather than – no, if I slow down, what is it that I need from this relationship? Or from this world in general that I’m going too fast, and I don’t even see it. Right. I don’t even understand it, I don’t see. Kind of put it in religious terms, the energy that God gave me, which was, ‘What do I feel?’ and, ‘What do I need.’ Cuz we were all given that from day one here on Earth. Right. We’re never without a feeling. We’re never without a need.
Curtis: Right.
Stephen: But when we’re going too fast, it – we become unconscious of that stuff.
Curtis: It’s funny. So that totally makes sense to me. We kind of just have a blind spot to what we feel and what we need. It’s funny that a lot of times our answer to that might be to go external and look for someone else. Even if it seems somewhat healthy. The ‘Happy wife. Happy life.’ There’s a spin of that where it’s like I want to provide for my wife. I want to meet her needs. I want her to be happy, and we’ll all get along, and all of that stuff. But it’s just funny how we can then take it too external and kind of ignore the internal.
Stephen: Well, it’s kind of like balance too. Right. If we’re too unbalanced, always placating everybody else, or serving everybody else’s needs, we lose ourself. So, the pendulum has to swing back. It can swing back too far, and then you could always just focus on yourself. That’s not what we want either. So, we want to balance. Right, but my work is to bring that pendulum back a little bit because it really needs to be maybe go a little past for a while. Take yourself out to go on a camping trip by yourself. Go in a float tank by yourself. Do something for yourself. Which is what when I work with men a lot, what a lot of men need because they’ve been taught, ‘Hey, I just need to please this person,’ but then it becomes a smothering situation because they’re always just looking to kind of like take care of this person rather than myself.
Curtis: Yeah. and I think probably for men and women, I can speak to the men part. We’re kind of taught and programmed to always, ‘Go. Go. Go. Go.’ You know in work, in our marriage, in our relationships, even in our recreation. A lot of is sports or competition driven, it’s just always, ‘Go. Go. Go.’ And society, as you talked about earlier, feeds that. So, boy, I just – this feels like something that is really widespread. Do you see this as a problem in a lot of the individuals and couples that you work with?
Stephen: Yeah.
Curtis: People not slowing down.
Stephen: Oh, definitely. Right. I see people’s eyes darting back and forth. They tell me like, ‘I have constant thoughts. How do I stop this thing.’ And they’re just on this constant cycle of having to ‘Do. Do. Do. Do. Do.’ All the time. And it becomes a really difficult process for them to just be in a moment. Just be at this time. In this moment, what’s God giving us right now? Yeah, and just see like the awesomeness and the happiness that just being here right now can. We think it’s got to be something epic or something we got to strive towards, and always be working towards, but we never really get there.
Curtis: Yeah.
Stephen: Cuz we forget the now. And we forget to slow down to understand happiness is, like Nietzsche says, the little things.
Curtis: Right. It’s funny because I think we can all go back, it from a Christian perspective, thinking about that’s not how God created us to be, but even in my human finite mind I think probably like in the 1800s, there I just have this image in my head of everybody on a horse, or walking, or in a wagon, and just going very slow and life is much slower. And that’s not what we – where we exist today. It’s just funny how in relatively recent times this seems like it’s become a bit of an epidemic.
Stephen: Well, that’s like Buddhist monks, I think, came here to the US to teach mindfulness – which is this big buzzword or whatever.
Curtis: Yeah.
Stephen: But they found that while they were teaching it, they are getting caught up in the quickness – in this distraction of our culture, and they said to the people that kind of brought them there like, ‘We need to go now. We’re going to get caught up in this, and this is not a good thing for us.’ So, this is our society. It’s something like you said. It’s started and it’s ramped up since horses, and it gets faster and faster and faster until we’re like totally unconscious of ourselves. Until we can become more conscious and say, ‘Hey, what the heck is really going on here,’ we’re just going to keep going, and by the way just to be totally honest I’m writing a book on this right now.
Curtis: Really?
Stephen: Mhmm.
Curtis: Wow. Look forward to reading that.
Stephen: And I just see more and more and more of how this is affecting our lives.
Curtis: Yeah. For sure. Well, Stephen, thank you so much for being on the podcast today. If you are human and you are alive in 2024 this is probably something that you have struggled with, trying to slow down. Life going too fast. Life seeming too chaotic, and if you would like to talk to a counselor here at Crosswinds Counseling about it, we have many wonderful ones like Stephen. And you can find them all at crosswindscounseling.org. Again, thank you Stephen for being with us. Thank you for joining us. We’ll see you next time on Conversations with Crosswinds Counseling.
Outro:
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