What Would It Take for You to Be Still?

There's an article I love called "What Would It Take for You to Be Still?" by Catherine Price, originally published in Oprah Magazine in 2010. The opening still makes me laugh:

She decides she needs to learn to meditate because her life is on warp speed. Weekends blur into months; months blur into seasons. I eat fast, I talk fast, I walk fast — I swear I even sleep fast. So she puts on her yoga pants, downloads Jon Kabat-Zinn's mountain meditation, sits on the floor, closes her eyes, and tries to imagine herself as a calm snow-capped mountain.

Within minutes, her mountain has become a volcano. She is mad at herself for letting her mind wander. She's pretty sure mindfulness exercises aren't supposed to include obscenities.

I quote this not to make fun of her — she's actually a beautifully honest writer — but because I think she's describing something really common. And the people who recognize themselves most in her description are often the same people who would benefit most from learning to slow down.

I want to talk about that today. As a therapist and as a trained mindfulness teacher, this is territory I sit in often — both with clients and in my own life.

The People Who Can't Be Still

I see this pattern often in my practice. A capable, accomplished person comes in. They're managing a lot — a career, a family, responsibilities, a calendar. They're competent. People rely on them.

And underneath, there's an exhaustion they can't quite name. A sense that life is moving past them faster than they can metabolize. A feeling that they're racing through their own existence and not actually in it.

When they hear about meditation, mindfulness, somatic work — anything that involves slowing down — they want to try. They genuinely do. And yet when they sit down to actually do it, something happens that is usually some version of what Catherine Price describes: their mind won't stop, they get frustrated, they feel like they're doing it wrong, and they conclude that they're not the kind of person who can do this.

What I want to say to those people, and what I'll say here:

You're not bad at stillness. You're guarding yourself against it. There's usually a good reason. And the difficulty itself is information.

Why Stillness Is Hard for High Achievers

For many of us — and this was certainly true in my own life before I became a therapist — speed is doing something for us.

The constant motion is a way of staying ahead of feelings. As long as you're moving, producing, achieving, problem-solving, you don't have to feel what's underneath the motion. Slow down, and the things you've been outrunning catch up.

This isn't a character flaw. It's usually a coping strategy that worked for a long time. Maybe it got you through a difficult childhood. Maybe it built the career that supports your family. Maybe it's the thing that's kept the harder feelings at bay during a chapter of life when you didn't have the bandwidth to feel them.

But after a while, the strategy starts to cost something. You lose touch with your body. You lose touch with what you actually want. The relationships that matter most start to feel thin. You sense, somewhere, that you've been managing your life rather than living it.

The desire to slow down is usually the desire to come back into your own life. The resistance to actually doing it is usually the part of you that's worked hard to keep certain things at a distance.

Both make sense.

What the Research Actually Shows

Setting aside the inner experience for a moment, the research on mindfulness is striking enough to mention.

Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction — the eight-week program Kabat-Zinn developed in 1979 — is one of the most studied forms of meditation in the world. The findings consistently include reduced stress, improved emotional regulation, and even physical effects: enhanced immune response, faster healing, lower inflammation.

Some of the most interesting work, which Price's article touches on, comes from the neuroscientist Norman Farb. His research suggests that practiced meditators activate different parts of the brain when responding to experience. Most of us, most of the time, run experience through the medial prefrontal cortex — the brain's narrative center, where we're not really feeling our life so much as commenting on it. (Traffic jam → I'm going to be late → this is awful → I'm always so behind → why does this always happen to me.)

Practiced meditators can shift to a different mode, activated through the insula — a part of the brain that processes present-moment experience without immediately layering judgment on top. (Traffic jam → cars are not moving.)

The point isn't to never feel anything in response to your life. The point is that mindfulness gives you a small but meaningful gap between what happens and how you respond to it. In that gap is your freedom.

Why I Care About This as a Therapist

I came to this work as both a clinician and a trained mindfulness teacher, and over time I've watched how closely the two run together.

I do depth-oriented psychodynamic work. I do somatic work. I do KAP. None of that is exactly meditation. But all of it depends on the same underlying capacity that mindfulness builds: the ability to slow down enough to actually be present with what's happening, in your body, in real time.

Most of the change my clients experience over the long term comes from this. Not from insight, not from technique — from the slowly developed capacity to be inside their own life rather than watching it from a distance.

This is part of why I sometimes weave mindfulness directly into our work — short practices in session, suggestions for between sessions, ways to bring more present-moment awareness into ordinary moments of your day. Not because mindfulness is the answer, but because the muscle it builds is the same muscle therapy depends on

Common Things That Get in the Way

A few of the obstacles I see most often, in case any of these are familiar:

The expectation that it should feel good. People often assume that if they're doing it right, meditation should feel peaceful. Sometimes it does. Often, especially early on, it feels boring, irritating, restless, or quietly emotional. None of that is failure. The discomfort is often what's been waiting for you to slow down enough to notice it.

The judgment that arrives the moment your mind wanders. As Price beautifully notes, judgment is its own form of distraction. The mind will wander. It will wander again. It will wander a thousand times in twenty minutes. The practice isn't preventing the wandering; it's noticing it without making it mean something about you.

Trying to do it perfectly. People who are good at things tend to want to be good at this, too. But meditation is one of the few practices where "trying harder" reliably backfires. The practice is more like learning to fall asleep — the harder you grip, the further away it goes.

Skipping it because you're too stressed. This is the most painful version. The days when you most need to slow down are usually the days when you're least willing to. I'm too overwhelmed to meditate today. The very statement is a description of why it might be useful.

Going it alone when something deeper surfaces. Sometimes, when people start to slow down, what comes up is bigger than a daily practice can hold. Old grief. Suppressed anger. The sense that something has been quietly wrong for years. If that's where slowing down takes you, it's not a sign you should stop slowing down. It's a sign you might need someone to slow down with you.

A Different Question

The article's title is what stays with me: What would it take for you to be still?

It's a real question. Not rhetorical. For some people, the honest answer is: I'd need to know that what comes up when I stop moving won't undo me. Or: I'd need to feel safe enough. Or: I'd need permission to not be productive for a while. Or: I'd need someone to be there when I stop running.

Those aren't excuses. They're the actual conditions. And once you can name what would be required, you can start working toward it.

For some, that work happens through a practice you build at home. For some, it happens in therapy, where the slowness is held by a relationship. For some, it happens through both. None of it requires you to be a "natural" at stillness. The people who arrive at real stillness are almost never the ones for whom it came easily. They're the ones who kept showing up despite finding it hard.

A Last Thought

Catherine Price ends her piece with one of Kabat-Zinn's lines that I find quietly beautiful:

We only have moments to live.

Not in a grim way. In an actual way. Your life is happening in moments — the breeze against your skin, the play of light on the grass, the sound of someone you love laughing in another room. If you're moving too fast to notice them, you're not just missing meditation. You're missing your life.

If you've been racing through yours and you'd like a place to slow down — with a therapist and trained mindfulness teacher who knows what it's like to outrun feelings, and who can help you stop running — I'd be glad to hear from you. You can book a free consultation here.