Devon Hornby LMT
Slowness teaches us to listen. Rhythm teaches us when to move and when to rest.
In the previous post, we explored slowness as a way of life.
We considered how the increasing speed of modern life can separate us from our bodies, our surroundings, and one another. When everything is accelerated, we lose the opportunity to feel what is actually happening. We become increasingly dependent upon stimulation to tell us what to do, where to go, and how to feel.
Slowness creates something different.
It creates space.
And when we have enough space, we begin to notice something that was there all along:
Life has rhythm.
The body has rhythm.
The breath has rhythm.
The heart has rhythm.
Sleep and waking have rhythm.
The seasons have rhythm.
Relationships have rhythm.
Learning has rhythm.
Work has rhythm.
Even our lives themselves have rhythm.
Perhaps one of the great difficulties of modern life is that we have become increasingly skilled at overriding these rhythms.
We expect ourselves to work at the same intensity every day. We expect ourselves to exercise without adequate recovery, to learn without allowing what we have learned to settle, to remain socially available without solitude, and to remain productive regardless of what our bodies or circumstances are telling us.
We try to make life continuous.
But life isn’t continuous.
Life pulses.
The Rhythm of the Day
Consider the simplest rhythm: waking and sleeping.
We wake. We become active. We engage with the world. Our attention moves outward. Eventually, energy decreases. We become quieter. We sleep. And during sleep, an enormous amount of activity takes place beneath our awareness.
Then we wake again.
The new day isn’t simply a continuation of yesterday. It is a renewal.
There is something profound about this rhythm.
We don’t have to earn sleep. We don’t have to accomplish something before we are allowed to rest. Rest is not a reward for productivity.
It is part of the process that makes productivity possible.
The same is true throughout the day.
There are times when attention is naturally outward and active, and times when it wants to turn inward. There are periods of concentration and periods when the mind needs to wander. There are times for conversation and times for silence.
We can cooperate with these movements, or we can continually override them.
Many of us have learned to override them.
Coffee when we’re tired. Screens when we’re restless. Stimulation when we’re bored. Food when we’re depleted. Work when we’re exhausted. Entertainment when we’re lonely.
None of these things are inherently wrong.
The question is whether we can still feel the rhythm underneath them.
The Rhythm of the Month
The rhythms of life aren’t limited to the twenty-four-hour cycle.
There are longer cycles as well.
Our bodies change across the month. Energy, mood, motivation, creativity, and capacity can fluctuate. The natural world changes in ways that are subtle from day to day but unmistakable when observed over longer periods.
We tend to think in terms of isolated moments.
Biodynamic awareness invites us to think in terms of cycles.
A difficult day may not mean something is wrong.
A period of low energy may not be a problem to solve.
A quiet period in our lives may not be evidence that we have lost our way.
Sometimes we are simply in a different phase of a cycle.
This doesn’t mean that every difficulty should be romanticized as “natural.” Sometimes something genuinely needs attention. But there is a difference between responding to a problem and assuming that every change in our experience represents a problem.
When we begin to recognize cycles, we develop another possibility:
We can learn to participate rather than constantly correct.
The Rhythm of the Year
The seasons make this especially obvious.
Spring moves toward emergence.
Summer toward expansion.
Autumn toward maturation and release.
Winter toward withdrawal, dormancy, and restoration.
We can see these movements in the natural world, but we can also recognize them within ourselves.
There are times in our lives when we want to begin things, explore, expand, and create.
There are times when we want to consolidate what we’ve learned.
There are times when things naturally fall away.
And there are times when we need to become quiet.
Yet our culture often asks us to live as though it were always summer.
Always growing.
Always expanding.
Always producing.
Always improving.
We are encouraged to treat rest as a temporary interruption of productivity rather than as one of the movements of life itself.
But a tree does not apologize for winter.
A field does not consider dormancy a failure.
And the body does not become unhealthy simply because it needs to rest.
Dormancy is not the opposite of life. It is one of the ways life continues.
Activity and Rest
This becomes particularly obvious in exercise.
We know that training stresses the body.
But the adaptation we seek doesn’t happen simply because we exercise.
It happens through the relationship between stress and recovery.
We challenge the body.
Then we recover.
The organism reorganizes itself.
It becomes capable of meeting a similar demand with greater capacity.
Without recovery, training becomes depletion.
The same principle applies far beyond exercise.
Work and rest.
Effort and recovery.
Learning and integration.
Speaking and listening.
Giving and receiving.
Engagement and solitude.
Expansion and contraction.
These aren’t opposing forces.
They are partners in a rhythm.
Learning Has a Rhythm Too
We often approach learning as though more information automatically produces more understanding.
Read another book.
Take another course.
Listen to another podcast.
Learn another technique.
But there is a point at which adding more information actually interferes with learning.
Something needs to settle.
We need time to digest experience.
There is a rhythm between learning and doing.
We learn something.
We try it.
We discover what we actually understood.
We make mistakes.
We return to the learning.
We try again.
Eventually, knowledge becomes embodied.
This is particularly important in body-centered work.
There is a profound difference between knowing something intellectually and having it become part of our way of being.
Integration requires time.
The organism needs space to reorganize.
Sometimes the most productive thing we can do after learning something new is stop learning for a while and live it.
The Rhythm of a Lifetime
And then there are the larger rhythms.
Our lives have seasons too.
Childhood.
Adolescence.
Adulthood.
Parenthood.
Maturity.
Aging.
And eventually, death.
Each stage asks something different of us.
One of the difficulties of aging, for example, is not simply that the body changes. It is that we live within a culture that continually tells us that decline is something to resist.
We are encouraged to remain young, productive, attractive, active, and endlessly capable.
But perhaps maturity asks a different question.
Not:
How can I remain the person I was?
But:
What is life asking of me now?
The capacities that served us in one stage may not be the capacities required in another.
There is a time for building.
A time for striving.
A time for discovering.
A time for caring for others.
A time for teaching.
A time for letting go.
And eventually, a time for surrendering the structures through which we have known ourselves.
The biodynamic perspective doesn’t ask us to control these transitions.
It asks us to become sensitive enough to recognize them.
Listening for Rhythm
So how do we begin?
Perhaps we begin very simply.
Slow down enough to notice.
Notice when you have energy.
Notice when you don’t.
Notice what happens after exertion.
Notice what happens when you rest.
Notice when you want to reach outward and when you want to withdraw.
Notice the rhythms of your work.
Notice the rhythms of your relationships.
Notice the seasons.
Notice how your capacity changes over weeks, months, and years.
And most importantly, begin to notice what happens when you stop fighting the rhythm.
This doesn’t mean becoming passive.
Quite the opposite.
There is tremendous intelligence in knowing when to act.
But there is equal intelligence in knowing when not to act.
A farmer does not pull on a plant to make it grow.
An athlete does not train every moment of every day.
A musician does not play every note continuously.
Music requires silence.
The body requires rest.
Learning requires integration.
Relationships require space.
Life requires death and renewal.
Rhythm is the movement between these things.
A Simple Practice: Finding Your Rhythm
For the next week, experiment with observing rather than changing.
At three points during the day—morning, afternoon, and evening—pause for a minute.
Ask yourself:
What is my energy like right now?
Does my body want activity, rest, connection, or solitude?
What happens if I listen to that rather than immediately overriding it?
You don’t have to obey every impulse.
You are simply learning to listen.
At the end of the week, look back.
What did you notice?
Were there predictable periods of energy and fatigue?
When did you tend to push beyond your capacity?
When did you rest?
What happened when you did?
You may begin to discover that your life already has a rhythm.
The invitation is not to create one.
It is to learn to live in relationship with the one that is already there.
From Slowness to Rhythm
Slowness and rhythm are closely related.
When we slow down, we become capable of perceiving.
When we perceive, we begin to recognize patterns.
And when we recognize patterns, we can begin to participate in them.
This is one of the fundamental movements of biodynamic living:
from controlling life toward listening to life.
The goal isn’t to become perfectly balanced.
Living systems aren’t static.
They continually move.
They expand and contract, rise and fall, awaken and sleep, emerge and dissolve.
Health may have less to do with remaining in some ideal state of equilibrium than with maintaining the capacity to move through change without losing our relationship with ourselves, one another, and the larger field of life.
That is rhythm.
And perhaps learning to live rhythmically is one of the simplest ways we can begin to come home to the living world.