Everything you need to know, on a busy sidewalk

What you discover when you notice

Sometimes people don’t want to slow down and get Zen because they have such fast moving daily lives.

The world doesn’t just move fast, it rewards fast. Speed reads as power, as competence, as winning. Slowing down too often means soft, losing ground, loser energy = bad. So of course nobody wants to do it.

I worked with a highly placed government official some years ago who had hit a wall and knew they had to slow down or risk even greater health risks.

They were already bought in to the idea of finding a meditation and awareness practice that worked for them, and wanted to work with me specifically because the kind of meditation I teach is more about developing conscious awareness and doing energy practices that the body can sense/feel, and they really liked how the tools and practices gave that sensory and fairly immediate feed back.

This person was also wicked smart, as one normally needs to be to be that high up in the federal government. Obviously this is before the current administration.

People that are very smart, have very well developed minds, specifically successful in the institutions and organizations that have been around for some time now, have particular difficulty.

The difficultly is two-fold. One - because they’ve successfully onboarded all the systems thinking that goes into corporate or institutional culture, and are successfully navigating and living by those intricate, though too often unconscious, criterion. Two, because at those echelons of success, the pace is specific and faster than the optimal operating system of the human body/mind.

Lastly, it’s all too thinky for optimal operating in a body.

“Oh, that can’t be true,” you might say, and then list out all the common references to how “we can do anything,” and of course the modern lifestyle is the pinnacle of all human development throughout time.

Sure. Only, none of that is true. And you know it. We all know it, no matter how “secretly.”

You are deeply familiar with all the micro and macro ways you have to adjust, manipulate, adapt and change yourself to fit in and own your success.

So now, just see if you can imagine, instead of adjusting and changing yourself, your clothes, vocabulary, presentation, posture, for every situation you navigate in a day — see of you can imagine staying the same in all those circumstances, and allowing or requiring the environment to adjust to you? What you need and prefer?

Now, before you think I’m saying - be the narcissist in the room - what I’m saying is see if you can imagine not abusing others, but taking care of yourself in all those situations, and not by hiding yourself but by being yourself?

Try this — when you are walking down a busy street with a lot of other pedestrians, who moves first when you and someone else are walking towards each other?

Notice if you are the person who never adjusts their course no matter who is walking towards them, or are you the person who is always adjusting to get out of other people’s way.

Here’s the clue - if you are always one thing or the other, you aren’t noticing; you’re on autopilot, which is so often what is rewarded for being predictable.

The more powerful way is the third way. There’s always a third way, and in this situation the third way is to — notice.

Notice if there is another person coming towards you; notice if you have an urge to adjust and get out of their way, or an urge to not adjust and make them move.

Notice what is actually happening in the moment; notice whatever urge kicks in inside you; notice how it feels to make a different choice than usual; notice how it feels in your body when you do it different.

Noticing is the key to everything.

The government official I mentioned earlier — one of the first things they noticed was how often they walked into a room already performing. Already adjusted, already armored up before anyone had said a word. They'd never felt it before because it was so automatic, like plowing ahead or always getting out of the way on the sidewalk. Once they felt it, once they noticed, they couldn't unfeel it. That was the beginning of everything changing.

It's never about going unprotected; it is about discovering and practicing an entirely new, powerful presence of yourself that actually provides a much more secure living than barriers and autopilot ever could.

4/28/26