Wake Up, Human
Wake Up, Human is an exploration of the native powers of the human being. This podcast examines the ways we humans have become disconnected—from our innate wisdom, from each other, and from the natural world—and explores practical strategies for reconnecting to wholeness. Drop in for information and inspiration to help us reawaken and heal ourselves, our relationships, and our planet.
Wake Up, Human
Ep.23: The Tyranny of Urgency and the Wisdom of Slowing Down
The constant pressure to do everything immediately has become so normalized we barely notice it anymore – but this "tyranny of urgency" is destroying our wellbeing, relationships, and connection to life itself.
Urgency isn't just about feeling rushed; it's a colonial, capitalist programming that keeps us disconnected from our bodies and each other. When we're constantly in emergency mode, our nervous systems become dysregulated, our critical thinking shuts down, and we lose touch with what truly matters. As your host Shannon Willis shares from personal experience, this urgency paradigm can lead to physical injury, emotional burnout, and a profound sense of isolation.
But there is another way. Drawing from wisdom teachers like Eknath Eswaran and Dr. Rocio Rosales Mesa, Shannon explores simple yet revolutionary practices that can break urgency's spell. The gentle phrase "take your time" – offered to others and ourselves – works like magic to diffuse pressure. Physically slowing down signals safety to our nervous systems. Reconnecting with natural rhythms reminds us that periods of rest are essential to life's cycles.
Perhaps most powerfully, resisting urgency helps us reconnect with our shared humanity. In our hyper-individualistic society, we've forgotten that no one is meant to carry life's burdens alone. When we slow down enough to see each other – really see each other – we remember that relationships, not task completion, are what we'll value most at life's end.
Ready to reclaim your birthright to move at a sacred pace? This episode offers both validation and practical tools for swimming upstream against urgency culture. As the Tao Te Ching reminds us, "Nature never hurries, yet everything gets done." Listen now to discover how slowing down might be the revolution your life is waiting for.
Hello everyone and welcome to this episode of the Wake Up Human podcast. I'm your host, Shannon Wills, and in this episode I am going to be pushing back on this cultural idea we have that everything needs to be done, and everything needs to be done right now, or everything needs to be done yesterday, now, or everything needs to be done yesterday and there's too much to do, and we're all overwhelmed and can't possibly imagine how we're going to fit anything else into our lives, especially relationships, other people, all those important things that we really care about, that we want to make time for, but we're so busy chasing behind the urgency of life that we don't even find time to remember who we are and what we love and what we want. I'm going to talk about that in this episode, and if this sounds like you, well, it sounds like me too. So come along with me and let's explore how we can slow down and reconnect to the true pace of life. See you on the inside.
Shannon W.:Welcome to the Wake Up Human podcast. I'm Shannon Wills, a curious wanderer with a passion for digging into life's mysteries and mining them for wisdom to apply to our modern lives. This podcast explores the ways we humans have become disconnected from our native ways of knowing what we have lost and what we can gain by coming back into wholeness. Each episode will explore this theme of reconnecting with our innate human power in order to heal ourselves, our relationships and our planet. Thanks for spending some time with me today. Now let's jump into the latest installment of Wake Up Human. Hi everyone, thanks for joining me in here inside the podcast room, which is actually my living room. I'm so grateful to have you with me today.
Shannon W.:Before I get started talking about today's theme, which is the tyranny of urgency and the wisdom of slowing down, I have a couple of announcements, a couple of quick things I want to say. One of them is whoever gave me a review on Apple Podcasts? Whoever gave me a review on Apple Podcasts? Someone named Blog the Change? I just want to say thank you. I saw the review last week sometime and I didn't know it was there and I saw it and it was the kindest, most thoughtful, most generous review. And I don't know who gave me the review and I've asked a couple of times for reviews, but I haven't really put it out there that much. So when I saw the review, I was so touched and I just am grateful for anyone who's taken the time to do that. I also saw some other reviews where people had given me stars, which is also very, very welcome, even if you don't even want to say anything. But I want to give a real special shout out to Blog the Change and say thank you. I see you and I receive you. I receive your kind words.
Shannon W.:So, with that said, I'm going to shift over to the topic at hand, which is the tyranny of urgency. I've been thinking about urgency a lot these days and I have also been affected a lot by urgency these days. I I was planning to do this next podcast episode on Palestine. I have a lot of things I want to say about Palestine and I'm and I'm formulating those ideas, and I noticed that, as I was in the formulation of those ideas in that episode, all these things kept coming up in my life that were just things that needed to be addressed. So I was helping to find a family member, find housing. I'm still helping with this. I was supporting, started supporting another family member through a health crisis and, at the same time, I'm looking for work, for paid work, which feels like a full-time job in itself.
Shannon W.:And then this stray cat showed up at my house and was trying to get into my doors and harassing my other cats and snuck into my garage and caused just some like constant disruption. And then we had a snowstorm, a big snowstorm, one of those late spring snowstorms with the heavy, wet snow that bends over trees and breaks branches and I had trees bending over and I'm outside picking up after the snowstorm and that cat came back and the cat was freezing out in the cold, and so I actually brought him in and made him a home in my bedroom for a couple of days and then jumped on to Craigslist and next door trying to find his home. And then, in the middle of all of that, there was a blocked pipe. The output pipe for the water that leaves my house and goes out to the main pipe in the road was blocked, so I wasn't able to use water in my house, and since my partner left last fall, I'm now the only person, or the only human person, in my house, and so I need to take care of all of these things.
Shannon W.:So as I'm doing all these things, in the back of my mind there's this little wheel that's turning saying yes, but what about that podcast episode. Yes, but you said you were going to make an episode on Palestine and as this wheel is turning, it's cranking and I'm feeling this old, familiar sense of anxiety come up and overwhelm. It's this kind of sick feeling. It's this kind of sick feeling in my belly that overtakes me when I feel I have too much to do and then there's one thing, that or many things that need to be done and I'm just thinking about them, like judging myself, like why am I not getting to this episode? Well, I said I was going to do this, like a little dog nipping at my leg and just keeping this wound open and I'm kind of slowly bleeding. Well, at the same time, I'm not doing anything wrong. That's a psychological game I'm playing with myself. That's actually hurting me. The world isn't going to end if I don't do the podcast episode on Palestine. I doubt that anyone is sitting around like tapping their fingers going, oh my gosh, what a jerk she is. She said she was going to talk about that. She hasn't done it yet. No, everybody else is living their own lives too.
Shannon W.:So, in the midst of feeling this sense of urgency and this eating and this biting and this machinery, I'm actually taking a class right now with an amazing woman. Her name is Dr Rocio Rosales Mesa. She is a Chicana, mexicana, medicine woman and seer and I'm taking a course with her right now on, I want to say, decolonizing the profession of therapy. And Dr Rocio, her work itself for me has been so healing. Please go and look her up if you're at all interested in exploring the themes of unlearning our colonial programming. You can find her on YouTube and you can also find her on Instagram at drrosalesmesa d-r dot rosalesmesa, and just give her some love and respectful attention because, man, she is really putting out some. She is speaking truth to power in a brave and yet compassionate way, and that's a rare and precious voice to find these days. So as I heard Dr Rocio talking about urgency in one of our last sessions, I just went oh my gosh, she's really, really naming it.
Shannon W.:And what I'm feeling, what I'm calling overwhelm and anxiety, it's really urgency. It's this sense that there's not time for everything, that everything has to happen now, that if I said I was going to do it, I need to do it now, and if I don't do it now, then there's something wrong with me that I couldn't do what I said that I was going to do. There's something wrong with me that I couldn't do what I said that I was going to do. And that's a type of programming that we take on in this world when things are moving so quickly and it's absolutely true that things are moving so quickly. Look at the news cycle, look at how fast the life's reality blips in front of our screens and disappears. We're right in the middle of a TV show. Well, I'm not because I don't watch TV shows, but I know how TV shows go.
Shannon W.:When you're right in the middle of a TV show and blip, you're on a commercial and blip, you're back to the TV show and you're on a social media screen and you're scrolling and you're flipping. This thing, this thing, this thing, this thing. We're being trained, we're literally being asked to be able to hold on to everything at the same time and also to be able to hold on to nothing, because nothing lasts more than a few seconds. And it makes perfect sense that we might feel a sense of urgency if we're not getting something done that we said that we would do or we feel we needed to do, because if we don't do it, the moment really may be gone, we may really lose the opportunity. The next screen might erase the one that we're on right now.
Shannon W.:So I sat there and I really thought about this and I journaled on this, like what are all the ways that this urgency has affected my life? And I know them. This is not the first time that I've explored this, but once again, during this time I have taken time to really see the ways that I work in my life taking on so much more than I can do, saying yes to more than I can do, agreeing to help more people than I can reasonably help, having more on my list than I can possibly achieve, and taking on too many things at once because it all feels urgent and I'm trying to do it all at once instead of spreading it out over time, because it feels like it needs to happen now, because tomorrow there's going to be a hundred more things that need to be done. Can anyone here relate to this? I also have a long-standing habit of being late, or just barely arriving just on time or a few minutes late, and this is also related to urgency. It's because I'm always trying to fit so many things in that I'll push myself until the last minute, until I need to leave, to go be somewhere on time and I end up showing up a little bit late. And I've actually worked on this quite a bit and I'm happy to say that I'm arriving on time and early frequently these days. So we can change. And so there's the taking on too much, the running late, the staying up late later than I mean to, a lot of times has been a habit for me in the past, also because I'm trying to get as much done as I possibly can before I go to bed and then that seeps into that sense of urgency, actually seeps into my resting hours, my sleeping hours, not only pushing them back but infiltrating my mind with urgency before I'm falling asleep, which is also not healthy. And again, I wonder if any of you can relate to these things. I even see it in larger aspects of around choices that I've made in my life, and this one is even a little bit personal. I'm not even sure if I really want to say this one or if I'm going to edit it out, but one of the things that has come to me it has been a sad recognition for me as I've explored this topic of urgency just most recently is I'm also recognizing my choice not to have children as part of this capitalist colonial programming of urgency, Because over time my teen years, but especially in my 20s and my 30s I felt like I had seen my mom be a single mother and I had seen her work two jobs or three jobs just to pay the bills, just to put food on the table.
Shannon W.:And I saw that and I went she doesn't have time for herself and she doesn't have time for us, her kids. There's no time for people who have kids, especially single mothers. So if there's any possible chance that I would ever find myself being a single mother, I better not have any kids. And just to say this is nothing against my dear mother, who is really a saint, she's amazing, she's beautiful and she worked her butt off to give my brother and me a better life. I love you, mom. And there's a lot more layers to that belief system that I created around whether or not I wanted to have children. But I can see at least a piece of it.
Shannon W.:Is like not having children when I would have otherwise wanted to is like a sacrifice to this way of being urgent. There's no time for this. I need to take care of myself. I need to take care of my life. I need to be able to make the money that I need to take care of myself. And it's not enough to take care of myself. I need to take care of my life. I need to be able to make the money that I need to take care of myself. And it's not enough to take care of someone else too.
Shannon W.:You know a child, because you know they say it takes a village to raise a child. But what if you don't have a village? There was no sense of like community. You know, when I was growing up, we can all hold this together. You don't have to do this all by myself.
Shannon W.:And there's this sense of doing it all by myself, doing it all by ourselves, that contributes to that urgency. I've got the sick family member and the unhoused family member and I've got the cat and I've got the snowstorm and I've got the blocked pipe and I've got the house. And when we feel we need to do it all alone, that sense of urgency can take us over so much more powerfully. And why do we think we need to do it alone? And why do we need to do it alone? Well, this is part of our cultural, not just programming, but part of our cultural reality. We're literally living in separate houses where I've got a line of 20 houses on my block. Every single one has their own lawnmower, right, every single one has their own I don't know snowblower or whatever we all think we need to have. We're not sharing. We're not sharing the load Every single person mowing their own lawn and our society isn't built so that we can share the load in so many ways, right, Whereas culturally, ancestrally, if we were living according to our indigenous life ways, we would have been sharing the load.
Shannon W.:We would have been living intergenerationally. We would have been sharing the load. We would have been living intergenerationally the grandparents caring for the grandchildren, the children caring for the parents as the parents grow older, neighbors caring for neighbors, community coming together and sharing, out of necessity sometimes, but also out of community, also out of a shared understanding that community rises and falls together. It's very different than that individualistic way that we've all been taught to be or most of us anyway in this modern world, where there's this hyper individualism and the sense we have to do it all of our, all ourselves.
Shannon W.:To thank dr rocio for flagging that term, hyper individualism, because it really does highlight what the core issue is here, of what the colonial paradigm has instilled in us that is so damaging us versus them, us separate from them, us better than them, and each of us on our own, pulling ourselves up by our bootstraps. Because I can't win unless someone else loses and, on top of all of that, because we're all separate, I can't depend on anyone else but me to take care of me. No wonder everything feels so urgent. And I want to also flag right now what that looks like in activism. If we're someone who really wants to work for change in the world and we of environmental justice or ecological justice, it's so huge that if we have an idea, this hyper-individualist idea, that we need to do it all ourselves, we're going to burn out in about two seconds. There's no possible way we can do it all, and so, again, that leads to burnout, it leads to overwhelm, it leads to us feeling like we're not being effective because we can't contribute.
Shannon W.:And guess what it also leads to? It leads to apathy, the feeling that, well, the problems are so big, there's nothing that I can do about that. I'm just one person. Why should I even try? Or I'd like to help, but I can't. I don't even have time. I'm too busy running on my own wheel just trying to keep my head above water. That's the tyranny of urgency. So let's just think about that for a minute.
Shannon W.:What is urgency really? What's it doing for us? Is it doing anything good? I'm going to say no, because there are times where we need to act urgently. There's a genocide going on right now. There's an ecocide going on right now around our planet. There are urgent issues in our daily lives, in our communities and in our world that need urgent solutions. But guess what? If we're too busy feeling urgent about every small thing in our lives, how are we going to have time for the things that are truly urgent?
Shannon W.:So in this way, urgency on the day-to-day level, that urgency, that biting your heel, urgency, can become a smoke screen for what is truly urgent. It can also be a smoke screen for what is truly us, because our intuition may be speaking to us, our bodies may be speaking to us. Our bodies may be speaking to us. Our spirit or our soul may be speaking to us, and if we are living in the urgent paradigm, that can actually dysregulate our nervous system so much that we are living in this constant fight or flight, and anything that is not constant fight or flight is not even able to compete for our attention, including other things that are truly urgent. And that's because the state of fight or flight literally keeps us in an emergency state. The part of our brain that is activated during that time is the amygdala and the older aspects of our brain that are programmed to focus on our survival, and when we're in that space, our prefrontal cortex literally shuts off, our ability to think critically shuts down. It's not available to us. Our connection to the rest of our body and what those messages might be telling us is shut down too, because all of our life energy is going toward pure survival Fight, flight, freeze or die.
Shannon W.:So this is why I'm calling all of this tyranny. What is tyranny? It's an oppressive force that takes control of our lives and takes power over us, and in this sort of cruel, oppressive way that we didn't ask for and we did not invite, it forces us to live a certain way that is contrary to the way we would have lived otherwise. So when I ask myself what do I need to do about this, I say what would I be doing otherwise If it were up to me. So I have a friend I just was talking to him on Saturday.
Shannon W.:I have a friend who last November, december he got so extremely sick, he was so close to death, so he went to visit a family member and he caught a virus and he didn't know he had caught it and he went traveling and during that traveling he started to get sick and he actually caught another virus and then his immune system began to be overtaxed, overcompromised and he ended up catching yet another virus or bacterial infection. He ended up while he was still traveling, before he got back home and made it to the hospital. He ended up having multiple illnesses stacked on top of one another and he was so extremely sick when he was admitted to the hospital. The medical crews had to fight to save his life. And the reason I bring this up is because, as he was telling me the story about this, he told me that, in the midst of literally fighting for his life and sinking rising, know, rising and falling from consciousness, in the middle of that, he somehow found the last bit of energy that he could muster in order to remotely manage a crisis that was happening at his workplace. The workplace was having a crisis. He told me what it was. Yes, it sounded like it was a pretty big deal, but he's at death's door.
Shannon W.:But the urgency of that crisis and the urgency of his management and his bosses saying like you're the person who can do this, we really need you to do this. This is an urgent crisis and you have to take care of this. It was not life and death. No one was going to die, no one was going to be injured, except maybe my friend and yet he felt and everyone else around him apparently felt that it was understandable to ask him to do this and that it was required of him to respond.
Shannon W.:This is the tyranny of urgency. It's also the tyranny of capitalism, which is part of the problem. And let me just say I'm not judging my friend. I'm hurting for him. I'm recognizing how painful this is, how scary this is and how sad this is that we could actually choose unnecessary urgency over our own lives. So I just said a lot about urgency, about tyranny and about damage done, and I want to talk about what we can do about this. How can we live differently? How can we refuse the tyranny of urgency in our lives, even if we're living within systems and structures that support that and perpetuate that and seem like they require that at every turn.
Shannon W.:And there are a lot of things that I could share here, ideas that I have for remedies for this urgency, but the place I really want to start is with the idea that what we really need to start with is to slow down. We need to get off the urgency train. We need to step off and walk. The speed of life we're all on is not realistic. We need to slow down enough to remember what is realistic. So I was thinking about slowing down and this reminded me of a teacher I studied quite a bit in years past Eknath Eswaran. And Eswaran was a spiritual teacher from South India and he wrote a beautiful book. It was called Meditation. I think the book now is called Passage Meditation.
Shannon W.:But one of the teachings in his book that really struck me and has always stayed with me is this thing that he teaching. He calls take your time, and in this practice of take your time, one of the things he teaches is the actual practice of saying to another person take your time right. So maybe I'm on a phone call with someone or I'm in line at a store or for some reason, someone says, oh, you know, I'm so sorry, give me just a minute. Or oh, this just might take a few minutes, and then I say take your time. That practice of saying to someone else take your time, it's magical. It's amazing how it diffuses. There will be a sense of urgency.
Shannon W.:When someone says that, oh, so sorry, give me just a minute. And we say take your time, it diffuses. It's like the urgency is a ball of energy that's sort of surrounding that situation and impinging upon it or pressuring it. And when we say take your time, you can literally feel that energy release, that energy unwind. And I've used this so many times when I go to someone in a situation like that and I say take your time, and they just go like that, and I say take your time, and they just go, thank you. It's like you recognize them as a human being and not as one more thing that has to get done or one more thing that's causing you to slow down on your own urgent trajectory.
Shannon W.:And, over time, what I've also learned to say and Eshwaran might have also taught this, but I've also learned to say it to myself when I feel like I'm really again on that urgency train. If I have the wherewithal to catch myself, and when I say, oh, I have to do this and I have to do this, and oh, I didn't get this done, or oh, I'm not getting that podcast episode recorded that I said I would, I can say it to myself it's all right, take your time. And it's like I said, it feels like a gift and it's interesting to see how that practice speaking for my own life I can see how that practice has sort of woven itself into my life in such a way that it will help me to now make time for others or feel more generosity of time toward other people, without even using the words take your time. So there's an example of this is when I was in.
Shannon W.:I was living in Oakland and I was at the DMV, and if you've ever been at the Oakland DMV you'll know it's an absolute chaos and everybody is in a hurry and everybody's waiting in line and it just feels like everybody's in an urgency time warp. And I was in this very long line and when I eventually got to the front, the woman who was serving at that desk, she looked so miserable and I really saw that. And she's been with person after person after person after person, and everybody's in a hurry and everybody's impatient, everybody's getting mad. And she just looked so tired and I said something to her like I don't remember, you know you look tired, you know I don't remember, you know you look, you look tired, you know. And she just looked at me and she goes I think you're the first person who has seen me all day, the first person who has said anything to me like a human being. And she went on to tell me briefly that she wasn't feeling well and that it had been a really hard day for her. And we just talked for a moment while I was checking out, doing whatever business I was doing, and by the time I walked away, she smiled and I hadn't done anything special except for just not being in a hurry.
Shannon W.:And this is one of my favorite things about slowing down and saying no to urgency is that it can help us and others feel less alone. Because in this world of hyper-individualism, where everybody's just on fire with their own agenda, it can feel really lonely just to exist in that, even when we're surrounded by other people all around us, can we slow down long enough just to see each other and just to say hello, let alone to be able to reach out a hand and help, because there are 7 billion or 8 billion people on this planet and nobody is meant to be alone. So, saying, take your time. I just recommend it as it's an excellent practice to play with and see what it might do to your sense of urgency, and I'm reminding myself now, during this time of urgency for myself, that I could really use a reminder of that practice. So I'm glad I'm talking about it.
Shannon W.:You know this last week or a couple of days ago, when this cat was here and the cat was coming up to the door and trying to get in and my cats were hissing at him and I kept chasing this cat off, chasing him off, and at one point I felt terrible because he was a very sweet cat but he needed to go home and I actually got the hose out and I put the sprayed the hose at him and I felt awful and he ran away and, mind you, this was not, it wasn't a feral cat. He was clearly a lost cat and he was trying to find his way home and that's one of the reasons I felt so bad. But so it was nighttime and he came back and he was staring in the storm door and I saw him and I said, oh, I'm just going to chase him, I'm going to chase him really hard and I'm going to really scare him and get him out of here. And I bolted toward the door and I ran out the door and down the steps and I tripped on the steps because I was looking at the cat and I tripped on the steps and I fell down the steps and I did. Fortunately, I kind of flew off the steps because I tripped so hard and I landed in the grass and I did a barrel roll in the grass. I literally fell off the steps and barrel rolled and then I was laying there in the grass, going, am I okay? Yeah, I'm okay. Fortunately, I landed it's very soft grass and I went wow, okay, you bolted out of that door too quickly, right, you're going to cause some damage. Slow down. And when we get feeling too urgent about things because it wasn't just about the cat, it was everything else that I was carrying with me that had me already in that place of urgency when we get feeling too urgent, that's what we do we just like overshoot ourselves and we can just find ourselves laying flat on our backs because we were moving too fast and we weren't careful.
Shannon W.:So that reminds me of a story of when I was traveling in Mexico. Gosh, this is probably many, many years ago. I was crossing the border between Mexico and Guatemala and we were doing a river crossing, so the border was actually the river and we were crossing in a boat and so we had quite a while to chat with each other. It was like a little canoe boat and there were probably eight of us on there and we had time to chat. And I was talking to this man and I don't remember how the story came up, but it always has stuck with me. He was talking about being in a hurry. You know, you can't be in a hurry to cross this border, right, it's going to take. However long it's going to take, we're going to float at the speed of the river. There's no motor. We're going to arrive to the other side when we do.
Shannon W.:And that reminded him of a story, and it was a European man. I think he was Norwegian, he was an older man and he said you know, here's what happens when we try to do things too quickly. He said imagine you're sitting at a desk and you have a glass of wine on your desk and you have a candle and you are sitting at your desk and you're writing or you're doing your work and you've got some you know your beautiful journal laid out or your papers, or your artwork. And then you, because you're focusing on what you're doing, you reach over for your glass of wine and then you kind of accidentally touch it with your hand and you spill the glass of wine and then, as the glass of wine is spilling, the glass of wine is spilling on your papers. And then this urgency hits you and you're like, oh my gosh, I have to save my papers. And in the movement of like saving the papers and moving your papers out of the way, then you hit the candle and you knock the candle over and now you have your. Now the candle knocks over the other side of your desk and it catches the rug on fire. Now your rug is on fire. Now you've got a serious problem. And I love that story. It's again. It's always stuck with me because it's like yes, you might.
Shannon W.:One thing might be urgent, Like you spilled that glass of wine, but if you let that urgency overwhelm you, you may actually create even more, an even more dangerous situation by your response. So when something feels urgent, let's take a beat. Take a beat, take a breath, slow down. A glass of spilled wine is not a great thing, especially if it ruins your piece of art. But a burning rug, and now it's going to set your house on fire well, that's worse.
Shannon W.:So why do we do these things? Again, it's like our nervous system right. Something overwhelms us and that's the way that we react. So we need to slow down and say what if I just take a breath, one breath here, to consider what really needs to be done? Soften perspective. Do I really need to do this? Is this really urgent perspective? Do I really need to do this? Is this really urgent? And so relating to urgency is also relating to time. Slowing down is shifting our relationship to time and taking back that relationship as our own. It's our birthright to be able to work and to be able to rest.
Shannon W.:Just like the land, seasonally, is not always working, the land needs fallow time. There's the planting, there's the growth, there's the harvesting and then there's the fallow time. But our society is living as though there's no such thing as fallow time. For some reason, we think that we're planting, growing, harvesting, planting, growing, harvesting and we're forgetting that in between the harvest and the sprouting of a new seed, there's a breath, there's a waiting, there's an inhale and an exhale. The rest of life has not forgotten this. The trees, the plants, the other land creatures, the sea creatures, they're all remembering, they're all living according to the rhythm of life. It's just we weird humans who have forgotten the rhythm and instead we're using clocks to tell us how much we have to do and when it has to be done.
Shannon W.:How many people have gotten to the end of their lives and said they wish they would have lived more urgently? More likely, they have said they wish they would have slowed down and appreciated their lives and taken time for the people and the things they loved and been fully present for them, and taken time for the people and the things they loved and been fully present for them. You know a couple of episodes. I created an episode about my friend, susan, who recently passed, in January, beginning of the year, and it felt really good to me to take time to dedicate an episode to talking about Susan. And she was also a person who. She was a slow mover, she revered slowness, she was someone who lived according to some seasonality and didn't allow herself to get too rushed.
Shannon W.:And I'm remembering now when my friend Melissa and I went to see her when we found out that she was sick and we drove up to our place and we brought her lunch and we were chatting afterward and we were sitting in her room and she was laying back in her chair. She was really struggling. She was laying back in her chair and she at one point she sat up and it really took some energy to sit up and she reached over to Melissa and I and she reached out one hand to each of us and she grabbed each of our hands and she said these relationships, these relationships, and she shook our hands, these relationships are the most important thing and there was joy on her face. She was so happy we came and that was the last time we saw Susan and when we went to her memorial, her partner was there and he was speaking a bit about her and he said that in the end, the end of her life, her last days, when they didn't know how many days she had, they just knew she had some days and every day they would wake up and they would say we have today, and then they would honor that day by being as fully present as they possibly could for that day, because they realized how precious that was.
Shannon W.:And when someone's at that point where it's their very last days and they know it's that their last days, what must that be like? And here's the rest of us just rushing through our days and nothing wrong with rushing when we need to rush, but we can be like rushing through things that are absolutely not important. You know, it's like that quote in Carlos Castaneda's book about Don Juan. Don Juan says something like the foolish man waits when he needs to hurry and hurries when he needs to wait. So slowing down and taking a breath, even in a moment, especially in a moment where something feels urgent, can help us to decide whether what we are doing is good for us or not. Is it wise or is it foolish, right? So recognize the urgency, question the urgency, be curious about it, and then, if it doesn't serve us, we can release it.
Shannon W.:Another practice I want to offer for bringing ourselves into a slower space when we're feeling urgency is to remember that that sense of urgency is often in our heads, and so by just bringing our energy down into our heart, down into our body, focusing on our body, focusing on our body, focusing on the chair or the ground, focusing on our hands or our feet. We can put our hand on our heart or one hand on the heart and another on the belly and breathe into that. Is there tightness in the body? What's going on in there? And another practice is we can simply feel the rest of the world just going outside and putting our hands in the dirt or the grass or touching a tree. Or, if we don't have nature available to us, we can just go into this, go to the sink and run our hands under the water. Something that pulls us into our body, something that chills our nervous system by reconnecting us to the world outside of us, something that pulls us down and out from the urgency of our mind, because when we're in urgency, we're in a small piece of ourselves, and a way to get ourselves out of urgency is to invite in our wholeness, whole body, whole breath, sacred pace, and we hold our hand under the water and we remember this is what I belong to. So as we release our urgency, we're also releasing our fragmentation, we're releasing our separation from the rest of life. This is kind of like on the same scale of saying take your time. It's like that that ball releases and a window opens up and goes oh yeah, there's the rest of the world here. Urgency is this tiny little pinhole focus that we're trying to run through, and stepping back from that is an opening back to our peripheral vision and a recognition of the bigger picture of things. So one more story I'll share and then I'll close.
Shannon W.:Last year I was in the middle of a very fast moving time, a time that had a lot of urgency and overwhelmed feeling. I was getting ready to leave my job and I was training the next person and I was putting together a lot of training documents for that. My job was taking a lot of energy. I was also still in my master's program to become a therapist and I was in the middle of a very difficult class that was taking up pretty much all of the rest of my waking hours. And in the middle of this my partner came to me and he said I want to build a shed and we have to build the shed right now, because if we build the shed right now we can get a 10% discount off the price. And he said I need your help to decide where we're going to put it, to clear the ground, to figure out the size that we need, to decide what color we need it to be, go, pick out the paint and build the shelves on the inside. And I just looked at him and I was like, do you realize how much I have going on? I do not have time for a shed.
Shannon W.:Well, guess what happened? He really, really, really wanted that shed and he signed the contract with the guy to have the shed built. And suddenly, on top of everything I was doing, oh, and we were planning a huge party for him for his birthday, and we were needing to clean up the whole yard and clean up the whole house in a way that we just never had before, and it was going to be a very big job. So that too. And he had to have his birthday on that particular weekend and the shed had to be done before then. And so guess what? That's what we did, and I should not have agreed to the shed. I tried not to agree, but I really shouldn't have agreed. It was like the tyranny of the shed.
Shannon W.:And the shed got built and everything got done, and the party got done and the job got done and the class got done, but in the process I hurt myself. I really hurt myself. My nervous system was so dysregulated really hurt myself. My nervous system was so dysregulated, I was having trouble thinking, I was having trouble eating, I was having trouble sleeping and at one point, right about at the time that the shed had been completed and I went out to the shed to put something in the shed and I was coming back to the house and I was running. I was sprinting back to the house and I was running. I was sprinting back to the house and I caught myself and I was like, why am I sprinting across my yard? And I realized that I had been sprinting back and forth for days, that that had become my new like running had become my new way of moving across the yard and through the house.
Shannon W.:I was running through the house and I went oh my God, and this time that I caught it, as I'm running, sprinting across the yard and I, for whatever reason, blessedly I caught it and I went what am I doing? And I literally screeched. I literally like you know, when you see on the cartoon, when it's like Wile E Coyote or Bugs Bunny, and they put on the brakes and you see them like screech with their feet. I screeched to a screeching halt in the yard and I went I need to slow down, and I started walking, and just walking. It gave that message to my brain. It was immediate A message to my brain like it is okay, we are not in a hurry, we are safe. And guess what? And my body and my brain responded with so much gratitude and calm. And guess what?
Shannon W.:The other thing was true, though, that when I was running, running, running, I was telling my body and my mind and my spirit, I was telling all of us we're in a hurry, we're in a hurry, this is urgent, there's no time. And I, by running with my body, I was signaling to my nervous system that we are in an urgent situation and, by extension, that we are in potential danger, that there is something we need to get away from or something we need to get to quickly, or else we're not going to be okay. I was unwittingly and needlessly being tyrannical toward myself and, on the flip side of that, by slowing down and walking, I signaled everything is okay. Isn't that incredible? Isn't that magical? We have power, we have intelligence.
Shannon W.:When we are stuck in overwhelm or we are stuck in urgency, we can feel powerless. But the truth is we have the power taking a breath, walking instead of running signals to our human system that everything is okay, that even if something important is happening, we are not in imminent danger, that we are human beings designed to live a rhythmic and cyclical experience and not machines that are always turned on on. So do we want the urgent, tyrannical, hierarchical, top-down, capitalist, industrialist, colonialist system and our programming in accordance with that system, in charge of our nervous system, or do we want to take it back and say take your time, I'm going to take my time and I'm going to walk across this yard? So if we decide that we really want to take our time, that we really want to slow down, we might need to set up some fierce boundaries around our slowness, because the world is not operating at that speed and others around us may not understand if we want to slow down a bit, if we're not riding on that same urgency train as they are, and they may judge us for not keeping up with the pace that everyone thinks we need to be keeping up with and they may call us lazy thinks we need to be keeping up with, and they may call us lazy and we may judge ourselves and we may call ourselves lazy.
Shannon W.:We may need support and courage to slow down and to disengage, to get off that train, because not signing up for urgency, that is swimming upstream, that is countercultural, even though it is in harmony with our true nature as human beings, it does run counter to the cultural narrative that we're all living in. We really do need some support on this journey, and that includes me too. So if you ever need some support, if you ever need someone to just not judge you or to just understand, reach out to me and we can keep on hopping off that train and swimming upstream together, because none of us needs to swim alone. There's a line in I believe it's the Tao Te Ching, which says nature never hurries, yet everything gets done. I want to live at the pace of nature, I want to live at the sacred pace of life and I am going to trust that everything that needs to get done will be done, including that next episode, and I hope you'll join me in slowing down In these urgent times. May we all slow down enough to know, to see and to care for that, which is truly important. Oh, and, in case you're an animal lover, and, like me, if I were listening to this episode, I would have been wondering the whole time whatever happened to that cat. Did you ever find the home for that cat? Yes, great news my hard work paid off and I found the home of that dear cat, and it's actually a pretty amazing story. I'll leave that for another episode. Thanks for caring friends.
Shannon W.:That's it for this episode of the Wake Up Human podcast. Thank you so much for taking the time to journey with me through this topic today. That is so important to me right now and I hope it's been a benefit to you too. Once again, I want to offer my deep gratitude to Dr Rocio Rosales Mesa for the conversation on urgency that turned into the seed that sprouted into this episode. Also, thank you for your guidance and your teachings and your own courage on the path, which is inspiring me to go deeper into my own. If you want to learn more about me and Wake Up Human, you can find me at shannonwillscom, and if you're interested about my new therapeutic healing sessions that I'm offering, you can find information about those at shannonwillscom forward slash sessions. Thanks again for listening. Happy spring, and may you find joy in the remembering. Bye for now, thank you.