As we stop scarfing down our meals, racing to and from work, speeding through our chores, and ignoring the countless cashiers, waiters, taxi cab drivers, and other human beings we cross paths with every day, an interesting result is sure to follow: we will uncover our own world of exceptional beauty. And we will notice life’s little inspirations without trying—those oft-overlooked moments full of insight into our connection with everything and everyone.
Slowing down also has its more obvious benefits. Nutritionists have found that digestion improves when we eat food slowly.xv According to cognitive neuroscientists, reading slower enhances our rate of retention.xvi Yoga, with its combination of slow stretching and deep breathing, is recognized as one of the most sustainable and beneficial forms of physical exercise. Relationships that evolve slowly tend to last longer.xvii In today’s information age, knowledge may come fast, but we gain wisdom much more slowly. Do you remember how much you didn’t know about the ways of the world five, ten, twenty years ago?
Beauty and happiness are everywhere. The only question is: to what extent can we slow down and be present enough to extract the nectar from each moment? What if normal, everyday life is jam-packed with “Joshua Bell” moments, each with the power to inspire us, enlighten us, or teach us how to live and love better? How many of them can we see? What nuggets of wisdom can we derive from paying closer attention to our surroundings?
During these next five days, you’ll move through life as if there are no throwaway moments and see how much beauty you can uncover in otherwise ordinary or mundane environments.
INSTRUCTIONS FOR SLOWING DOWN
Select two activities. Pick at least two activities each day that you would normally rush through, and mindfully practice slowing down. Here are some ideas of where to start:
• Getting ready for work
• Showering
• Making a meal
• Chewing your food
• Driving to work
• Doing household chores
• Writing
• Working out
• Walking
• Having a conversation
• Reading the paper
• Performing work tasks
Record them in your log. Feel free to choose more than two activities a day, but make two your minimum. Each morning, after your five- to ten-minute meditation, jot down your statements of gratitude, thank someone for helping you in the past and, in your exercise log, write down the activities in which you will practice slowing down.
Practice slowing down. Once you’ve listed your activities, practice slowing down while going through them. Maybe try eating slower by putting the fork down in between bites. In conversations, make a point to speak less and listen more. Purposefully leave for work a little earlier in order to take the scenic route. In meditation, go the full ten minutes instead of five—that sort of thing. At the end of the day put a checkmark next to the activities you remembered to slow down with and note any discoveries you made. As an example, it could read:
Day 16:
Today, I practiced slowing down with:
Activity: Morning meditation
Activity: Commuting to my office
Discoveries: I felt more connected to others throughout my day and a stronger sense of purpose
With a little pre-planning, this activity should easily integrate into your daily affairs. Just make sure you allocate enough time to slow down in at least two specified activities. And remember, you’re doing this for yourself, to improve your life and increase your happiness. So let the slowing down exercise be organic as opposed to mechanical. Keep your form correct (no cheating!) by immersing your attention completely into the chosen activity. Notice as many sensations as you can.
Practice slowing down for five days before continuing to the next chapter.
OUTER GYM EQUIVALENT
SLOWING DOWN = SHOULDER PRESSES
Each time you successfully slow down, imagine that you’ve done a mighty set of shoulder presses. The shoulder press is your first inner exercise that equates to weight training, so you should expect it to be difficult, particularly if you go too heavy too quickly. Though it may be difficult, remember that it is a step on an active path towards happiness. Because you’ve spent the last couple of weeks building up your inner foundation with meditation and mindfulness, and your core with gratitude and receiving, you are conditioned to exercise slowing down with force! As the shoulders bulk up from the shoulder press, they frame the chest in such a way that gives the appearance of supreme strength. Likewise, slowing down and appreciating the moment when you’d rather be rushing gives you internal strength and orderliness. It may seem slight at first, but this muscle builds quickly.
EXERCISE LOG: SLOW DOWN
Day 16
Meditated for five to ten minutes
Listed my five statements of gratitude
Communicated a special thanks to: ______________
Today, I practiced slowing down with:
Activity ______________________________________
Activity ______________________________________
Discoveries:___________________________________
_____________________________________________
Rate my post-slowing down happiness level:
Very Happy 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Very Unhappy
Day 17
Meditated for five to ten minutes
Listed my five statements of gratitude
Communicated a special thanks to: ______________
Today, I practiced slowing down with:
Activity ______________________________________
Activity ______________________________________
Discoveries:___________________________________
_____________________________________________
Rate my post-slowing down happiness level:
Very Happy 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Very Unhappy
Day 18
Meditated for five to ten minutes
Listed my five statements of gratitude
Communicated a special thanks to: ______________
Today, I practiced slowing down with:
Activity ______________________________________
Activity ______________________________________
Discoveries:___________________________________
_____________________________________________
Rate my post-slowing down happiness level:
Very Happy 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Very Unhappy
Day 19
Meditated for five to ten minutes
Listed my five statements of gratitude
Communicated a special thanks to: ______________
Today, I practiced slowing down with:
Activity ______________________________________
Activity ______________________________________
Discoveries:___________________________________
_____________________________________________
Rate my post-slowing down happiness level:
Very Happy 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Very Unhappy
Day 20
Meditated for five to ten minutes
Listed my five statements of gratitude
Communicated a special thanks to: ______________
Today, I practiced slowing down with:
Activity ______________________________________
Activity ______________________________________
Discoveries:___________________________________
_____________________________________________
Rate my post-slowing down happiness level:
Very Happy 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Very Unhappy
Continue on to your next inner exercise after day 20.
If you’re important, people will wait.
— Chili Palmer in Get Shorty
Inner Exercise 5
BE PATIENT
(Days 21 to 25)
When I taught yoga in the early 2000s, I prided myself on my pu
nctuality. It bothered me when yoga teachers started or finished their classes late. I felt it made them look sloppy and disrespectful of people’s time. If you’re a teacher and you show up late, you send the message that it’s okay for everyone else to arrive late. Plus, you look unreliable and people won’t take you seriously.
Fortunately, I lived close to the studio where I taught most of my classes, and had my commute timed down to the minute. It took no more than five minutes to gather my gear and drive to the studio, three minutes to park, and five minutes to get up to the yoga room and set up. If I left 15 minutes early, I would have a few minutes left over to chat with my regulars before the class started.
Out of the hundreds of times I made that commute, one morning stands out. I drove up to the main street leading toward the studio and was surprised to find bumper-to-bumper traffic as far as I could see. I immediately turned around and zigzagged down to the other street heading in the same direction, only to get stuck in even more congested traffic. The odd thing about it was these weren’t busy streets, especially not at that hour—and definitely not at the same time. Something highly abnormal was happening.
My heart rate spiked and I became flushed with anxiety. Feeling choiceless and claustrophobic, I sat there like everyone else, inching at a snail’s pace toward impending lateness.
I attempted deep yogic breathing, which helped ease my nerves a bit, and from a calmer state, I remembered to call the studio and ask my students not to leave. About ten minutes later, I was nearing the only major intersection of the commute, which would’ve been the logical site for this mysterious hold-up. Scrutinizing all directions, I saw no obvious cause for the traffic jam. There was no construction, no accident, no ambulance or police tape, nothing unusual whatsoever. And once I got beyond the intersection, traffic began to spontaneously clear up. Now I was even more frustrated because there wasn’t even a legitimate reason I could blame for my lateness—I was just plain late.
I parked and bolted up the stairs, now fifteen minutes behind for my class. Then I slowed my pace to a casual walk so I didn’t appear rushed in front of my yoga students. That’s when I noticed through the glass wall that all of my students were huddled near the back of the yoga room while two janitors were sweeping something up in the front.
As I entered, I felt crunching under my flip-flops. My eyes grew wide as I saw a thousand shards of broken mirror blanketing the floor in the front of the room. Missing from the center-front wall was one of the large mirrored panels. According to the yoga students, the gigantic mirror dislodged and crashed onto the floor about ten minutes before I arrived, which would’ve been just after my class was scheduled to start. Astonishingly, it shattered in the exact place where I would’ve been sitting! But because I was late, no one was set up around me to practice yoga and no one got hurt.
The amazing coincidence gave me chills. The random, mysterious traffic jam with no clear cause that I was silently cursing and freaking out about fifteen minutes earlier was actually saving my students and I from having a very unlucky start to our day.
I then reflected on a conversation I had about a year prior with a monk at the Hare Krishna temple in Los Angeles. Over lunch, I was telling him about a bad breakup I had recently experienced and how much of an emotional toll it had taken on me. He knew about my commitment to daily meditation and other inner exercises, and responded matter-of-factly by saying, “Good for you. You’ve been spared.”
“How do you mean?” I asked.
“You’ve got so much spiritual protection around you from all of the inner work you do, that anytime something like that doesn’t seem to work out for you, you’re just being spared from something much worse.”
Needless to say, after the mirror-crashing episode, I truly understood what he was referring to. Ever since then, I’ve had a much easier time finding patience while stuck in traffic, or in line at the post office. I now know it’s likely I’m being protected from something far worse than a mild inconvenience, and the comfort of that understanding allows me to 1) behave like a time billionaire, and 2) stay relaxed when things aren’t going the way I would prefer.
The question you’re going to explore during these next five days is: what if getting held up in traffic, at airports, in line at the checkout counter, or anywhere inconvenient has the possibility of turning out for good? And if you hit roadblocks, can you remind yourself to relax, be patient, and treat the “obstacles” as navigational devices towards a better outcome?
WHY PATIENCE?
Patience has always been at the root of slowing down. Now, we’re going to give it a little more nuanced attention. While you are still practicing all of your previous Inner Gym exercises, you’re now going to include a three-step patience-building exercise that entails:
• Recognizing
• Reorienting
• Remembering
One cause of impatience is a rigid attachment to the outcome or timing of a given situation. Whenever we find ourselves attached to the extent that we can’t let go, we make ourselves vulnerable to distress. When we’re being impatient, the body initiates a reorganizing of its priorities away from long-term survival functions (like regulating cancer cells, keeping infectious diseases at bay, reproduction, and digestion) toward short-term survival functions (such as the release of coagulants into the bloodstream, increasing the heart rate and level of oxygen consumption, and disabling the part of the brain responsible for rational judgment).xviii Therefore, losing patience often can have a dangerously toxic effect on our long-term health. If our goal is to stabilize the feeling of happiness from the inside out, we can’t afford to feel impatient too frequently.
PATIENCE INSTRUCTIONS
Here is a detailed explanation of each of the steps you will practice in an effort to remain patient when faced with unexpected change:
Step 1: Recognize. Change is constant. Recognizing that the nature of the world is change and that you have little control over it can help you enthusiastically embrace change when it happens. If and when you find yourself becoming impatient in everyday situations, the opportunity with this step is to recognize that you’re more than likely locked onto a specific outcome. For example, during a heated discussion, you may think, “My spouse should be supporting me right now instead of pointing out what’s negative about the way I’m debating,” or in a traffic jam, you may say to yourself, “There shouldn’t be traffic on this stretch of highway at this time of day.” These sample thought-patterns stem from a prior attachment to life turning out in a certain way. Recognizing this pattern is your first step in overcoming it.
Step 2: Reorient. French journalist and author Alphonse Karr once wrote, “We can complain because the rose bush has thorns, or we can rejoice because the thorn bush has roses.” Once you recognize that an outcome may differ from what you expected or anticipated, you have only a split second to reorient your awareness—or make a better choice about where you place your attention.
If you’re quick enough to reorient before the stress response makes you react to the negative aspects (the thorns) rather than reflect on something more positive (the roses), you can effectively neutralize a potentially impatient reaction. Reorienting can take shape in several ways, but at its essence, it means to remove your attention from the offender and place it on something more personally inspiring or positive. The offender may be the negative spouse, the traffic jam, the complaining co-worker, or the tardy friend. Carrie Fisher once said, “Resentment is like drinking poison and waiting for the other person to die.” Since you can’t control someone else’s actions, fighting against them is futile and leads to a more intense stress reaction inside of you, which means that you ultimately pay the price. Here are four fast and effective ways to reorient:
Breathe deeply. Take five to ten slow, deep breaths. The stress response causes our breathing to become erratic, and by breathing more deeply we send a message to our body to override the stress response and remain calm and relaxed.
&n
bsp; Appreciate the goodness. Take your attention off a potentially negative outcome and place it on whatever good you can derive from the situation (this is a carry-over from your inner slowing-down exercise). Is there a useful message or a valuable lesson you can learn? A favorite Sufi saying of mine is, “If a pickpocket meets a saint, all he sees are pockets.” If you train yourself to look for the good in a dilemma, all you will see is the good. Maybe the lesson is that you need to speak up for yourself next time, or that you need to be okay with saying “no” to requests, or that you shouldn’t expect apples to fall from mango trees.
Practice thankfulness. Another way you can reorient your attention is by adopting the attitude that while a situation may be far from ideal, it could always be worse. A popular Buddhist quote reads, “Let us rise up and be thankful, for if we didn’t learn a lot today, at least we learned a little, and if we didn’t learn a little, at least we didn’t get sick, and if we got sick, at least we didn’t die; so, let us all be thankful.”xix
Survey the surroundings. Many times I’ve been stuck in traffic or at the dentist’s office and noticed something that spawned an idea or a way of thinking that became very useful later on. Nowadays, when life doesn’t seem to be going my way and especially if it’s out of my hands (which is most of the time), I try to notice what else is taking place around me that I might’ve otherwise missed. Who are the people around me? Where are they coming from? What art is surrounding me (graffiti, billboards, paintings, hairstyles, fingernails, stylish designs of any kind)? What messages am I detecting? Is there anything relevant for me in this moment? Whenever I step back and look around, I usually see something or someone who inspires me in some way, or that triggers a thought I wouldn’t have had if I’d been rigidly fixated on the outcome or timing of the initial situation.
The Inner Gym Page 6