2025 August 28
When was the last time you said to yourself, “whoa, I didn’t know how much I needed that?”
I recently returned home from a weeklong meditation retreat experience and reflected to a close friend. In the moment of sending a quick text, the words that surfaced were, “it was everything I didn’t know I needed.”
Sometimes even experiences deemed as “good for us” yield a surprisingly deeper layer of gifts. In this scenario I knew that I needed to slow down. I also knew how good it would be for me to unplug from devices. I knew that my deeper self had been yearning for some uninterrupted, deep-dive sitting on the meditation cushion. No doubt in my mind that all of those desires were going to be fulfilled. And it was something more that occurred during the week of unplugging, slowing down, and just sitting with my inner self which deeply nourished me, and was totally not what I thought I needed.
And…more detail on that to come, I do have plans to write up some of my reflections but what I want to expand upon here, and now, is more about the quality of a pause, of a mindful slowing down, and the concept of stillpoint. The “something more” occurred for me because of these things.
While slowing down, being mindful, taking a sacred pause might sound intrinsically valuable to some of us, let’s face it – most of us feel we have too much to get done, or that we will slow down when we can (i.e. “I’ll sleep when I die ;)) just not now. But if you’re wondering, the “something more” which manifested out of stillness included a beautiful connection with two fellow retreatants, a reconnection to my body (which had become a distant acquaintance over the past nine months,) and a new and deeper relationship with nature.
Most times we are unaware of what we are unaware of. Often I hear patients on the table say, “I didn’t know that muscle was tight,” or “I didn’t know I was this tired,” or anything similar regarding their body. And what makes me really happy after a craniosacral session is hearing, “I feel so much more like myself again.” Let me be clear about something. I don’t believe that slow = better than fast, or that we always have to stop in order to regain balance or return to our center. But at times, the experience of slowing down and pausing in stillness makes this return to center most available.
What makes subtle bodywork so amazing is also what frustrates many people about it. We don’t subscribe to naming what is wrong with someone and doling out a “take two of these and call me in the morning.” More than one pathway leads to health. A not so new, not so old research article stated the following in regards to the therapeutic use of craniosacral therapy:
Reducing physiological arousal and switching to the parasympathetic mode has been shown to enhance the body’s ability for physiological regulation and tissue relaxation, and to decrease chronic pain.
Sympathetic nervous system dominance helps us get shit done, get aroused, and get away from predators. We need it in our lives. And, including healthy doses of parasympathetic activity in regular intervals is crucial for our survival in a meaningful way. Many of us have found out the hard way what happens when we go, go, go, go, go all the time. We crash, burn and flop on the couch night after night, numbing out to reality television. This is where the beauty of intentionally pausing, slowing down or inviting stillness into our lives can play a starring role.
We might be capable of burning through our lives on sympathetic go-go juice for a very long time. Until we can’t. Then very often the slow down that we experience is not blissful. It is a crash, or a standstill, or worse. The idea of creating sacred pauses in our lives, or of stillpoints in craniosacral sessions is not slow for slow’s sake alone. No, I think the stillness helps us sustain our fluid movement through our crazy, and sometimes chaotic lives without needing so many clean-up on aisle 9 rescue calls.
When we allow for stillness to happen in a session we access “not a point in time, but rather a process of deepening into levels of stillness appropriate for the healing processes to emerge.” (Sills, 2011 Vol 1 p132) We go deeper. We rejuvenate or encounter parts of ourselves who can deeply support our wholeness, and return to our highest healthiest selves.
