Slow down you move too fast.
My journey beyond the cancer seas.
I was eager to write this blog and typical of my fast mind, the jostle of words was emerging around my skull at breakneck speed. I could feel the thrill of unfolding the mini story for you all here; this weeks offering on Lys’s voyage back into the all of it. Computer open, blank page ready and I started to laugh. My very racing to serve the words upon the screen was such a direct example of the very thing I wanted to expound upon today. That being the disparity between the mind and body in terms of the difference in the speed they work.
On the one hand my mind is and always has been eye wateringly fast. I understand concepts at the speed of light, often knowing the outcome in a given discussion before it has happened. My mind having sifted through the likely scenarios whilst holding court in the conversation. Ridiculous really when I consider this now in light of my recent time in cancer lands. For today I had a eureka moment that makes so much sense of why I have been having difficulty engaging in my world beyond home space. A moment of clarity that exposes how I have been making myself tired in the process of these reconnections.
The truth is, though my mind has the quick silver capacity of having all tabs on simultaneously, so to speak. My body just cannot keep up. My physical form relates to my world in a slower and more deliberate way. And therein lies the issue. How to navigate the disparity between the two. Mindfulness practice, Qi Gong and Yoga have all been helpful modalities in this balancing act. Though for the most part its a daily task of holding my body back from keeping up with the speed of my mind. With the new reality of a system crash if I do not comply.
With a mother who was diagnosed with Cushing Syndrome a few years after mine and my sisters birth, it is fair to assume that her stress factors were above average whilst she was pregnant with us. From prevailing research it is apparent that children born to mothers experiencing large amounts of stress can go on to have higher cortisol levels in their body amongst other physiological factors. This makes sense to me in the context of my own story in that my body had normalised high stress and didn’t recognise it as a problem. So pushing my body to work at the speed of my mind seemed a fair thing to do when I was younger. Except that now I am now experiencing a massive cancer induced reset.
All of the daily practice toward self regulation has become all too glaringly crucial as I forge a path with this more sensitised version of myself. With others I am finding I can listen to and engage with content very deeply, so long as it is delivered in a peaceful and paced manner. As soon as someone starts to talk in a very fast disconnected ‘adrenalised’ way, my whole system rises up in protection. Similarly, if there is too much incoming information to navigate I grind to a halt.This is a new development in my nervous system response. And if I try to keep up, I get extremely tired and emotional directly afterwards.
This is a revelation. I am now spending more time asking for a readjustment of the speed of incoming information from others, and I feel hugely relieved as a consequence. My body system it seems is no longer running at high stress velocity, and I am learning the real flow of self regulation underneath the game of chasing cortisol.
I wonder how many of you can relate? This has been such a huge concept in my recovery. Perhaps we all need to consider the speed of our internal band width and take steps to do some readjusting. If we all take the time to engage our body when we step up to communicate and deliver in a considered way, then perhaps we can help each other in regulating our internal stress barometers.
It is not so much the ‘what’ but the ‘how’ we say what we say in this instance. As I see it, this is the first building block to good, balanced and stress free communication for us all.
