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EP92 - 3 Reasons You DON'T Slow Down and Why it's Your Greatest Medicine

aimeetakaya

Updated: 2 days ago





Do you ever wonder why it's so incredibly hard to slow down in life in your body and even mind? Today’s world largely praises productivity and constant motion, so slowing down can feel uncomfortable—even impossible. 


Today, Aimee explores why it’s so difficult to pause and how embracing a slower pace can lead to deep healing, self-awareness, and transformation.


So, if you’re feeling overwhelmed by life’s constant demands, this episode offers permission—and practical tools—to slow down, reconnect, and heal.


In this podcast episode, Aimee takes us through:

- Why society ties self-worth to productivity and how it fuels burnout

- How slowing down reveals emotional discomfort—and why that’s essential for healing

- Overcoming the fear that slowing down may lead to feeling “stuck” or “frozen” 

- The difference between choosing to slow down and being forced to by burnout or illness

- How Hanna Somatics can help relax the body and ease mental stress

- Why embracing the messy parts of healing is key to personal growth

And so much more!


Follow Aimee Takaya on: IG: @aimeetakaya 

Facebook: Aimee Takaya 

Learn more about Aimee Takaya, Hanna Somatic Education, and The Radiance Program at⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠www.freeyoursoma.com⁠⁠⁠.⁠⁠


LISTEN WHILE READING!

A: Hey, there listener. Have you ever wondered why it's so incredibly hard to slow down in life in your body? Maybe even in your mind? Today, we're going to explore the three main reasons why we don't want to slow down and Why it's incredibly powerful to do so and will change your life. Stay tuned. 


Every day, there is a forgetting, and every moment there is the possibility of remembering. Remembering who you truly are, awakening to your body, to the inner world to the experience of being alive. Here is where you find the beauty, the joy, and here is where you free your Soma. I'm your host Aimee Takaya. I'm here to help you move from pain to power from tension to expansion and ultimately from fear to love.


A: Hey everybody, it's Aimee Takaya. If I sound kind of Mysterious and you know soft spoken this morning, I just want to say disclaimer. It's like 3: 30 in the morning here, and I just got this like wild hair to record these podcast episodes. There's gonna be a few in this little series, right? And I just couldn't wait. I had to do it now. So I'm kind of like up close and personal with the mic whispering away at 3: 30 a.m. So yeah, I can feel a little bit more like a Conspiring. Yeah, Night Owl with me today exploring this concept of slowing down, and honestly like slowing down has been continuously one of my Deepest most powerful medicines and one of my biggest challenges. 


I don't think I'm alone in this So slowing down literally might mean Taking a moment and pausing throughout your day it could mean like saying no to certain kinds of social engagements or Responsibilities or obligations, right? Slowing down could literally just mean not putting so many things on your schedule and making space in your schedule to do nothing right slowing down in a literal sense when we're talking about like your body could mean Practicing Hannah's semantics, right? 


Which is like my whole deal You guys probably know that if you're listening to this podcast or some kind of movement technique that has you being really attentive and Patient and slow with your body Now like I said, we're gonna dive into why this is so hard because you know people say like oh, you know Slow down stop and smell the roses like relax. 


It's like. Oh, yeah, that sounds great But why is it that I don't want to why is it when I start to slow down? I immediately speed back up or as soon as my schedule is clear I have so much anxiety that I need to fill every last space in it, right? Why is it that when I go to take rest? 


I feel guilty for taking rest These are all really powerful questions and I'm gonna explore You know three of kind of the main reasons why we don't want to slow down number one is We are indoctrinated by society at large especially in our Western culture to be productive and to measure our worth by our productivity by how much output We you know give throughout the day other fact other pieces might be like, you know For some people how active they are how physically fit they are how attractive they are, right? How much they're producing like an image that they can present to society of like well-being for themselves, right? 


And that has a bunch of different faces, right? It's not just like, you know being like an over sizing like over exercising fitness queen or like, you know Getting some kind of work done, right? Like it could literally just be like having a certain kind of presentation of your home of your space, right? Now a lot of times we cannot as human beings live up to the level of productivity, right? 


And social expectation that we are under and that lack of like Meeting that standard, right? Within ourselves and within society at large keeps us on that hamster wheel going and going and going like I will speak from personal Experience like the dishes in your house the laundry It's never done like it's done for a moment and then within you know a day or two days There's more to do, right? And that's kind of how it is when we take on this idea of like productivity of output Like when when is it enough? When is it that we're done? 


When is it that society is done with us and the truth is like it's never ending and so to go down that path of Maintaining your self-worth and your importance in the world by how much you can do Right and how much you can output and how much you can present to the world, right? It's basically like a trap for exhaustion and endless stress. And because like I said at the beginning of this- You know explanation of this first reason why we don't want to slow down why it's hard to slow down because we are indoctrinated in our society from birth with this Anxiousness of needing to present a certain way show up a certain way.


And then produce x y and z it is very very difficult to come out of this mindset Right it becomes Entrenched in our nervous system and it is really a radical act to start to step outside of that expectation of ourselves and to be completely frank I don't think we ever really like completely get away from it. Right? Unless you go live in the woods and like aren't like part of society. But as a member of society as part of the culture that we've grown up in it is this constant thing that we have to become more and more aware of and recognize the impact of it on our bodies and on our souls Right on our like essence, right? 


So the number two reason why we don't want to slow down and it's really hard to slow down is that when you slow down You start to notice all of the shit. That's not really an alignment for you You start to notice the discomfort in your body you start to notice the ways in which you have been Compartmentalizing or pushing down your emotions your thoughts your feelings that don't align with whatever You know, you think you're supposed to do or with that productivity mindset, right? 


There's there's a suppression of our natural energy, right and our natural like Curiosity that again has gone on since birth right as part of that paradigm of like, you know productivity and control, right? And when we slow down it can become very uncomfortable because we are confronted with the pain we are confronted with the unpleasant emotions. We are confronted with the things that basically we have been too busy to pay attention to right now. 


There's a melancholic beauty to this right. Like I'm not saying like oh, this is bad And it's like it's uncomfortable But there are a lot of things that are actually quite uncomfortable that can also be incredibly beautiful and satisfying. You know, any ask any performer like getting up in front of people being seen, you know Performing whether that's like singing and playing music or public speaking, you know. Or putting yourself out there in some way it is uncomfortable and it's also extremely satisfying and like cathartic, right? 


So kind of changing our Orientation to what discomfort is and how we respond to discomfort, right? How we see our negative quote-unquote emotions and sensations in our body and in our physical experience is part of unwrapping this Challenge with slowing down that it becomes uncomfortable and that we start to become aware of the things that are out of alignment and that are not serving us and not working for us Right, so number two is that there's that confrontational energy of whoosh this- This is not this is not how I want to be living. This is not how I want to experience my life and yet I have been you know. Creating this experience for myself, right? 


We slow down we get in touch with all of that The third reason why it's so incredibly hard to slow down is that and this kind of ties back into the other two we have a Feeling that something bad is going to happen when we slow down We have a nervous system discomfort with slowing down because we fear Becoming stuck We think that if we slow down we're never going to move again. 


Have you ever had that feeling? It's kind of like oh if I let these emotions show up if I let myself feel my feelings I'm going to get stuck in them right I'm going to get trapped and so we keep ourselves running. Running from our emotions running from our physical discomfort running from the slowing down that you know would bring all that stuff to the surface that would challenge our worldview and you know, our programming right because we don't trust that it's not going to cause us to completely collapse. And to be completely frank that fear is totally founded It's actually legit and I just want to like Give you that moment to go. 


Oh, no. Yeah, that is real that fear, right? You're validated in that it is a thing that we burn out It is the thing that we shut down Right, it is the thing that we freeze up and lock up and ask anybody who's been forced into slowing down, right? That'd be me right here because I'm gonna get to that in a minute But like when you've been forced to slow down through an illness, right or through some kind of physical, you know Challenge right those are the kind of big ways that like they're just sudden like roadblock of life. 


And we like literally can't move our bodies or literally can't function, right other more kind of I Don't know less visceral ways might be like depression, right or crippling anxiety where we just lock up and freeze, right? And that still might be rather visceral, but I guess I'm guess what I'm saying is like we tend to like Pathologize those things and then medicalize, you know, like chronic illness and pain when it can give we can give it like a label Right, whereas depression we kind of think of it as like a mental health issue But in truth, like I said, it's it's very physical as well It is actually a visceral experience to be depressed, right? 


So kind of going back to this idea that you know, we fear this we fear slowing down because we equate it to shutting down And we equate shutting down to being stuck and frozen and unable to continue going forward, right? And like I said, this is founded on probably like a real experience that you've had at some point, you know Where you started crying and you just couldn't stop crying and it felt like you were crying and crying forever and ever and ever and ever, right? And then also, you know dropping out of like, you know, your Anxious energy to do do do and then you find you're like laying in bed for three days like doom-scrolling and like not answering any calls, right? 


Now I want to say that the Amount that you have been Like bulldozing through life and ignoring your emotions and sensations and ignoring the exhaustion and pain in your body Is directly correlated to how much you may need to shut down and rest and recover, right? when your body like actually makes Makes you do that and now the little crux here is that your body will make you do that and and it's very a very confronting reality to suddenly come down with a sickness or an illness, right? And that happens to like many people like once or twice a year. 


And even when they're sick sometimes people have a hard time slowing down, but they're like forced to right? It's much different When you consciously go into the slowdown when you consciously step into the shutdown When you don't fight it and you allow your consciousness your body your spirit to go along with What's showing up instead of being forced to do, right? so that's kind of the little shift that I'll invite you to consider here is that We are afraid of slowing down because we're afraid that we're gonna get stuck there forever But it's not a prison. It's healing mode Okay, I'll say that again. 


It's not a prison. It's not always stuckness sometimes it's being in healing mode and And our body demanding to get that rest that it hadn't been getting and when we can consciously step into it with more of that perspective that this is me Like sorting through stuff. This is my body literally and my consciousness literally cleaning house And when you clean house, it's messy. 


It gets messier before it gets clean again, right? So going into it with that mindset, you know and that heart set I guess you could say like emotionally stepping into that space of slowing down in a conscious way We can start to experience like a whole new I guess world that opens up for us And this leads me right into the biggest medicine is slowing down Okay, whether we're talking about shifting, you know. 


Let's let's take a few subjects here that that slowing down is incredibly instrumental in like Enriching these these different areas of self study of self Development, right? When we're talking about something like shifting a limiting belief We will only be able to shift something that we know about Right and how do we like uncover things? Right is often through some kind of slowing down right Even take for example like when people do these like plant medicine rituals or whatever, right? 


Like that's not really my thing, but like I Respect it, you know when it's done well, but let me take something like that. This is really extreme experience that causes your body to slow down Maybe your consciousness speeds up in some way, but you know Nobody's like doing ayahuasca and like literally like a running around on the mountains like getting shit done like that is not that is not the energy like when you ingest something like that it is. Forcing your body into this incredibly deep intense slowdown of everything and those insights. Right? come to the surface now. 


You don't need plant medicine for that many people can attest that you can get these same kind of insights through meditation. Through being in altered states of consciousness that can come naturally through, you know yoga through anesthmatics We absolutely enter altered states of consciousness you know meditation have been hypnotized or hypnotic states, right? 


There is a rich soil underneath all of our busyness that can show us these limiting beliefs, can show us the things that are out of alignment, and this happens in slowing down that we become aware of what's holding us back. And so if we want to transform a limiting belief, we first of all have to know what that belief is. 


We have to come in contact with it, and we have to come in contact with the impact of continuing to maintain that belief. And when we slow down, this is where that change actually takes place. Some other ways that slowing down puts you in that self-healing mode and is great, great medicine is the pain in your body. And this is a huge one for me and so many of my clients is that so much of everything that we are doing in our life and in our bodies is a doing, you know, even me just sitting here right now at my computer desk, there are certain muscles that are maintaining contractions to hold me upright. 


There are certain muscles in my face that are contracting to give me my facial expressions and to use my mouth, right? It may feel like a quote unquote sedentary activity to sit in a chair, you know, maybe eight hours a day, but it's not. It's actually very active, but in a really specific subset of muscle groups. So then that person who's been sitting all day maintaining these muscle contractions gets up, it's like, oh, I need to be active. Then they go out running. 


Well, now there's more doing. They go do yoga. They do do go do seated meditation. All of those things are still maintaining muscle contractions. And you will know that I am speaking the truth if you go to bed at night, and you can feel that your body is all tight and wound up, right? When you wake up in the morning after eight hours, whatever of like laying in bed, and yet you feel tight and stiff and have pain in your body on waking up, you can you can believe me when I say your brain is maintaining a doing your brain is maintaining muscle contractions, right? 


That is that are related to not only the level of stress that you're carrying, but also, you know, whatever activities you've done throughout your entire life, whatever muscle memory you're walking around maintaining, right? So with hanosomatics and with the movement practice that I do, which is super, super slow and puts the emphasis on the relaxing and releasing of your muscle, right? To tell your body to turn off that habituated contraction. 


This is so powerful for shifting pain, for shifting tension that is pressing against nerves that is pulling on ligaments that is causing your spine to come out of alignment. When you get your brain to relax and decontract and undo those muscular stress patterns, it changes so much. And in this way, this has been my deepest medicine in slowing down is actually literally slowing down and undoing the muscle contractions that I was carrying in my body that were part of my chronic pain. 


For those of you who don't know, I lived for seven years or more really. If I really like give it some thought in chronic pain that was incredibly limiting and was absolutely tied to my mental and emotional states, my stress, and also the physical things that I was putting my body through on a regular basis. 


So in slowing down, we can not only shift and become aware of our limiting beliefs and our mental and emotional patterns that don't really serve us. And we can actually, you know, becoming aware of them is the first step to shifting that men changing them, right? And then we can also turn off the tension in our bodies and the pain in our bodies that is causing us to feel physically overwhelmed by life, right, on a bunch of different levels. 


The other huge, huge medicine in slowing down is that it gives you the opportunity to feel and create gratitude. And a lot of people talk about gratitude, the importance of being grateful for what you have, you know, and you can't be grateful for what you have if you're just busy running around doing more things, getting more stuff, you know, checking more boxes off your list. Gratitude comes in in those quieter moments when we slow down and go, wow, look at what I've already done. Look at what I've already achieved. 


Look at what I'm already capable of experiencing in my life. I am so grateful for this beautiful day, the blue sky. I am so grateful for my body that continues to breathe and take in oxygen. I'm so grateful for the family members and the friends that I have in my life who I can connect with, right? I'm so grateful for the color red. 


I'm so grateful for you can be so grateful for so many things, but you can't be grateful when you are running your self-ragged. It's just your brain doesn't do that. It is prioritizing other things. It is not prioritizing gratitude and grace within your environment, right? So the other thing that slowing down is, you know, part of this incredible medicine of slowing down is connecting with your inner knowing and your intuition, right? 


And this is a huge one because when you start to cultivate this intuition, this felt experience of knowingness in your body, it overrides your mental chatter, right? And for those of you who may not know what I'm talking about yet, believe me, like, it's a profound experience to step out of the mental chatter of figuring things out and trying to know everything and actually becoming embodied in your felt knowing of something that requires no evidence and proof, right? This is the foundation of faith, right? 


Like, true faith. I was asking myself this question actually like a few days ago when I was experiencing a lot of mental and emotional stress, right? Because it still happens. I still, even as a somatic educator, it's not like I'm not human anymore. I absolutely go through stressful moments and stressful periods of time. 


And I was like really just like taking a macro view of myself and having some compassion for like where I was at. And I asked myself, I'm like, gosh, girl, like, how do you get through this? Like, you are suffering so much at this moment. And like, I know you've suffered before. And like, some of these themes that are coming up like have come up before. 


And I just asked that question, like, you know, how do you get through this? You know, and this immediate knowing came into my body of like, I am like safely and divinely guided, right? And it was a knowing and even those words, as I say them, like kind of fall short, like it sounds kind of like hokey and woohoo. But it was a knowingness that like, that like, I get through this because I am connected to something bigger than these moments of pain and fear and frustration. 


I am connected to, you know, what do you ever want to call it God, my higher self, my guides, like, there's so much like, wording that I could use around it. But when I stepped when I step out of that mental framework of having to define and know and label, and I go into the feeling and the knowing and the sensing of the truth of my experience, it's like, it doesn't matter what language I'm using, right? 


It's secondary to the experience of this knowingness. And it's this knowingness that gets me through the incredibly stressful moments in life and has gotten me through my incredible stress stressful moments in life and cultivating and building that awareness has come through slowing down, has come through becoming present to what is really true inside of me. So if you can kind of get a picture here of like the incredible medicine and power that slowing down is, you know, it's worth it. 


It's worth it to go through the possibility of a healing crisis or a shutting down or, you know, a temporary depression, right, that could occur when we let ourselves feel our feelings, right? It's worth it if you can go into it consciously and get to the other side of that knowingness of that, you know, freedom of breaking through limiting beliefs, right, of the freedom from being stuck in your body and physical discomfort and pain, right? 


And it's absolutely worth it to face the things that are in the way of your growth, the stuff that's uncomfortable and out of alignment that we don't want to face. It's so worth it to consciously step into that and go into that and just say like, okay, like, I'm not afraid, like this is part of the adventure of my life to experience these things. 


And I'm strong enough to do it, right? So I think the hardest part here, like kind of going back to the number like one reason or whatever, why it's so hard to slow down society and the culture at large, I'd say that one, that one is actually still like the hardest because it's an ongoing onslaught bombardment of need from our family, from our culture, from our work, right? 


And it doesn't feel like it ever ends because it doesn't. The only way that it ends is when we consciously step back from it and declare that we're not participating in that right now. But the truth is, you know, in order to function as a person, we're going to have to participate in it at some level, right? 


For some period of time throughout our day, throughout our week, throughout our year. And so that's really still the number one most challenging radical thing to do is to consciously go into that as well and to consciously take breaks and step out of that and exercise your autonomy, exercise your agency over your physical body and say no to the rat race and say no to the demand that the world puts on you. A really little micro example here would be like letting your house be dirty, right? 


Now, I'm not like, this is like a big medicine for me. I like having my place look beautiful and clean, right? Especially growing up in a very chaotic environment with like a single mother household and like my house was like house growing up was like always like chaotic and messy, right? And so I get very triggered by chaotic and messy environments, especially when it's my environment. 


And so it's very common for me to do like a lot of like stress cleaning and like anxious overdrive kind of cleaning. And one of the most radical things that I have done for myself in the last few years has been sitting with the messiness and letting it be messy and giving myself rest, giving myself time to experience my feelings, time to take care of myself, even though there's dishes in the sink, even though there's clothes on the bed, right? And then as I say this, this might not be your medicine. 


You might be someone who like, you know, doesn't have a problem like letting this be. But that's just one example of the way that we can say no to the intense productivity programming, whatever it looks like for you and prioritize our needs, our emotions and ourselves first, right? And that can be such a radical act. 


So we've kind of covered a lot of ground here in terms of why it's so hard to slow down, why we resist it, why we don't want to, right? Society tells us that we can't do that, that it's not functional, that we need to keep going, that we need to prove ourselves, you know, are afraid to face the things that we will end up facing when we slow down, whether that's physical discomfort and sensations or ways that we've been living out of alignment with our soul's purpose, right? 


Or our true sense of meaning in life, right? Or just fear of facing our emotions and stuff that comes up when we slow down enough to become present to it, right? And then there's also the fear that we're going to get stuck and that if we slow down, we're going to never move again, right? Or we're going to let our whole life just pass us by and fall apart. 


And, you know, like I said, that's a real fear that probably comes from a real experience that you've had. At the same time, there is something on the other side of these struggles, right? There is deep, deep medicine and aliveness that comes from moving through these difficult experiences and moving through what shows up to be processed when we slow down. 


And so I am a mad advocate for slowing down. And the way that I transmit that into the world specifically is through hanosomatic movement, hanosomatic body work, which is, you know, my modality that I'm, you know, trained in. And recently, over the last few years, I've had to step into the reality that I am like extremely well trained in this modality because, and this is a little backstory, being mentored by my dad and receiving a lot of the hands-on body work from my dad. And I'm so like incredibly grateful for that. And it blows my mind sometimes that like, I get to be super, super skilled at this modality and transmitted into the world in this really unique way. 


So, you know, if you are listening to this and you have found something helpful or useful about it, please connect with me, reach out, let's keep going with this conversation. Maybe you think of another reason why, you know, you're afraid to slow down. Maybe you can tell me a story about a time when you slowed down and it was hard, but there was something on the other side of it that you gleaned, you know, that you got that was incredibly valuable, right? 


This is a conversation. It's like an ongoing journey as we all navigate this incredibly like stressful and increasingly in stressful environment of our daily lives. And I got to say it's increasingly stressful because we are also simultaneously like more well cared for intended to in our modern western society than other times in history, right? Certain conveniences are, you know, certain needs are met to a degree. 


And so that actually increases how much stress we experience when shit hits the fan because we're so used to a certain level of control within our culture and society that, you know, the things that are challenging and legit like super challenging kind of stand out more amidst the, you know, mundane day in day out rhythm of our, you know, productive capitalist lives. 


So thank you so much for listening. If you again found this helpful, please like this podcast wherever you're listening to it from, maybe even leave a little review to tell other people about what, you know, what you found valuable about this podcast. It's been my honor to bring this podcast into the world and have these conversations and share this time with you. 


So yeah, I invite you to take a moment or two throughout the rest of your day to slow down and see what shows up for you in those spaces of stillness, in those spaces of quiet. Okay, till next time. 




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