Slow and Easy
Several years ago … it feels like a different lifetime … I received chiropractic treatments from one of the softest, kindest men I’ve met to this day. We’ll call him Scott. He had never planned to be a chiropractor. Helping other people wasn’t quite on his radar growing up. He preferred to be alone or with nature. A sensitive being in a male body, Scott’s heart didn’t open to healing others until after his experience being shipped across the planet to participate in a war that not only offended his constitution, but also left his body and mind in a squalor of pain and emptiness.
Scott found the assistance of another inspired chiropractor who became his guide both personally and professionally. His recovery from the various injuries and confusions created by the many flavors of war-related violence had its own timeline. There was no rushing the mind back to ease, and there was no rushing the spine or nervous system back into harmonious alignment. It was going to take whatever it was going to take.
Of course, by the time I met him, his battle experiences were far behind him. He had reclaimed himself and begun offering his unique combination of presence, energy healing and spinal treatment to assist others in any way he could. His defining trait, what everyone agreed was the reason we all came to see him, was his gentleness.
I was in the middle of navigating an abusive marriage with a man who was not interested in healing anything. He would receive treatment, but the good that was offered dissolved into a viciously sequestered reservoir of hurt. Every time we went to see our gentle chiropractor, my nervous system was working so hard I could have powered an entire city. Each visit, Scott, listening beyond the words I didn’t know how to say, saw my agony. I was stuck between wanting to help my partner heal and being totally aware that it wasn’t going to happen. Working overtime to solve every problem, I was trying to carry the burden of a “good relationship” by myself.
The times I did get to speak with Scott and share the turmoil within me, he would always give me very simple advice. Regardless of the situation, whatever angle I tried to approach it from, no matter how many details I brought to the table, he would just sit back in his chair, exhale and tell me, “Slow. … Slow and easy.”
My mind would race. Slow and easy? How do you make things go slow and easy? How can that be the only thing he says? What does that even mean?
I could not see, feel or even imagine beyond survival mode at the time. My life consisted of driving a hurt, angry man around to medical appointments in-between work and errands, always returning home to a battery of numbing addictions. Life had two speeds - blinding speed or torturous stagnancy.
Slow and easy.
How? How do I make him do that? How does life happen in “slow and easy?”
Yet, here was Scott, embodying those words, leaning back in his office chair, cupping the back of his head with interlaced fingers, amusement dancing in his eyes. Stacks of charts, receipts and other papers littered his desk. Fully aware that he was behind on his phone calls, he assured me, “It’ll all get done.”
There was nothing in my experience and nothing in my current world that supported the existence of “slow and easy.” For several more years, I worked at mastering everything but that. The words were always with me though. The presence and feeling Scott shared with me has never left. Slow and easy. It’ll all get done.
I came to discover that “slow and easy” is quite like a prayer or an invocation. You can’t bully anything into “slow and easy.” You have to just sort of invoke it and then, with a curiosity that can feel as unfamiliar as a visit to Alpha Centauri, watch what happens. In a way, that’s the whole point of slow and easy. Invoke what you wish, then sit back and watch it happen.
Scott, through the way he simply embodied the words, gifted me a divine conversation that expands far beyond spirituality. There is nothing that life needs to rush. The survival mode that is so common to humanity is a fabrication of priorities that, when not being actively fueled by anxiety, simply starts to fall out of your own way of being.
Slow and easy. Well, let’s just say … it’s an option.
