Hello beautiful humans of Substack. It’s good to be with you today on this Monday in August. This morning I woke up from a dream and my dream was about rushing, and I had no idea that this dream would become the theme of my entire day, or that it would turn into this transmission to share with you. It certainly kept revealing itself as the day went on. The first thing that I noticed this morning when I woke up was I had absolutely nowhere to rush to. I stayed in bed and read a couple of chapters of my book before I did anything else. For someone who has spent most of her life rushing, lounging in bed on a weekday morning felt almost illegal. (this book is soooo good, I am savoring it by just reading a few chapters a day!) In my corporate America days, Mondays were a big deal, and they started early and went late. It was like the report card came in every Monday. There were buckets of reports to go through and meetings to be had, and Mondays in my system felt intense for decades of my life. So this morning, well past that season of my life, a Monday with absolutely nothing to do felt incredibly luxurious. Here’s what I’ve been sitting with today, this theme of rushing. I started rushing young. I was an early rusher. I remember riding through traffic with my mom to get to Harvard for this elite swim practice after school, watching the clock, willing the cars to move. There was always traffic. Anyone who has lived in the Boston area knows what I’m talking about. Everything about getting there felt like a sprint. Then I would get in the water, and for the next two hours, time would stop. I didn’t have a language for it back then. I just knew that something happened to me in that pool that did not happen anywhere else in life. My breath found a rhythm, the black line on the bottom became the only thing in the world, thoughts came and went and I let them, and this was my first meditation. Years before I ever called anything meditation or knew the word. Fast forward to college, and I rowed. Same thing. We’d rush to the boathouse, rush to rig, rush to launch, and then we would be out on the water for hours sliding and breathing in unison, and the noise in my head would go quiet. Yes, I was a D1 athlete rushing towards a title, but I was also doing one of the most meditative things a human can do. I find that so interesting now, that some part of me was always choosing the slow inside the fast. My body knew what it needed even when my mind was busy chasing. I just naturally knew. Then I went into corporate life, and for the first time there was no pool, there was no boat, there was no built-in place where the rushing stopped for me. I became an executive by 26, and I rushed to that title, and then I rushed to the next one and the next one after that. I rushed through meetings I didn’t even need to be in. I rushed through meals standing at the counter. I rushed through the cafeteria line when I even managed to make it to the cafeteria. I even listened to podcasts at 2x speed so I could get more wisdom in less time. That probably tells you a lot about who I was in that season of my life. At some point in those years, I did find formal meditation, and it became a beautiful place where I could go back to that quiet. It was for sure a lifeline for me in that season. That season of my life was not balanced though. I was using meditation like a pit stop, 10, 20, 30 minutes of safety before I merged back onto the highway at full speed. I’m so grateful that I had this tool in my kit at that time, and it wasn’t enough. Underneath all of this rushing, it really was never about ambition. It was way deeper. It was about worth. I was rushing to feel worthy. I was rushing to be seen. I was rushing to finally feel like enough. In this season, every title was a bid, and every achievement bought me about 10 minutes of relief before I was on to what was next. I didn’t understand until much later, but I do know now that when we rush, we do not feel. Take that in. We cannot sit with a hard feeling at a sprint. We cannot hear a quiet knowing over the noise of our own momentum. Which means all those years I was moving fast and getting things done, I could not actually tell you what I wanted. Not really. I could tell you what was next on the list. I could tell you the next achievement. I could even tell you what everyone in the room needed. I could not tell you what my own heart wanted, because knowing that requires slowing down enough to feel it, and feeling was the thing I was outrunning. Unfortunately, the rushing did not stay contained to me either. It rippled. There were mornings I’d be slinging a Prada bag over my shoulder, chasing a ringing phone, making breakfast for the kids at a sprint, rushing my children out the door. I was handing my rushing straight to my kiddos, and I’m sure to my corporate teams as well. The kids are what really stick with me most. If you’ve ever tried to rush a child, I think you know what happens. They plant their feet, they slow down, and they resist us completely. What a beautiful mirror they were for me. It took me a long time to see it, and probably in those moments I was just frustrated that I was going to be late to my morning meeting. Undoing a lifetime of that wiring does not happen overnight. It took my “corporate detox”, as I lovingly refer to it, which is a real phase with real symptoms, by the way. I promise I’ll write a whole piece on that soon. If you are exiting corporate or considering it, this is important information. It took years of meditation, of somatic work, of finally getting quiet and listening. Over those years in my corporate detox, I began to titrate back to myself a little at a time. I love that word titration, these small doses. We don’t need to flood a nervous system that’s been running on urgency for decades. We just give it evidence slowly that it’s safe to come down, that it’s safe to slow down, safe to be held in our thoughts and our feelings. My friend Sarah Tacy has been in the somatic world for decades, and I love how she explains somatics. She uses this word “resourced” all the time. She talks about the movement between fast and slow in terms of being resourced, building the capacity to stay with yourself through whatever arises. When she first spoke that word to me, I don’t remember the exact moment, I just know that word “resourced” spoke to me. In my corporate days, I was not “resourced”, not to the degree I needed. I was running hard with almost nothing underneath me. Today, I feel deeply “resourced” in my partnership, in my family, in the work I birth into the world. Because of that, I can have big, fast creative bursts of inspiration, and I can also have slow, somatic mornings like today. It’s not one or the other anymore. It’s not that rushing is bad. Intensity serves us in certain moments and in certain seasons. That brings me back to today, and this is where it gets really good. After reading in bed, I went to a somatic workout class with two girlfriends, and it’s run by this beautiful woman, Ivy. I will tag her studio. It’s called Squat and Reset, and if you are local to me, you must check it out. I told her at my very first class that I think I helped manifest it, even though I didn’t know her at the time, because I have been quietly wanting this movement in my life. Then there was Ivy and her beautiful new studio. The whole design of the class is activation and then safety, all throughout the class. You’re going into the fire, you’re letting your body work hard, your heart rate climbs and your system revs and you feel that intensity. Then you come back down deliberately into rest, into being held, into this beautiful safety net. That’s the whole practice. It’s not about staying calm or staying revved. It’s learning to travel between the two on purpose. I love this because it says something that I did not understand for most of my life. Fast is not bad, and slow is not holy. Seasons of exertion are part of being alive, and I would not trade my rushing years for anything. The skill is not avoiding the intensity and the fire. The skill is knowing how to come back down out of it, and being able to feel yourself when you are there. The thing I love about Ivy’s classes is that each one has a theme, and today’s theme was about being enough. Somewhere in the middle of class, in my body, not my mind, something landed, and these words came to me. I am right on time. Not ahead, which is the story I told myself for decades. Not behind. Right on time. Here’s the part that really gave me full body chills. I have this piece of art hanging on my wall by Kara McKee, a former colleague of mine who is now an extraordinary singer-songwriter. This piece of art that she made is also words from one of her songs. I’ll see if I can tag it in here. The words that hang on my wall right above my desk from Kara are, you are right on time, you are loved, you are whole, there’s a divine plan of goodness written in your soul. (check out Kara’s newest album at the end of the article!) I have walked past these words for a long time. Today, in my body, in the middle of the workout, I finally believed them at a cellular structure. Kara probably deserves an article of her own. Her story is really incredible and beautiful, and she will get one one of these days too. I’ll share a picture of her artwork with you. After class I had nothing on my calendar for the rest of the day, and the three of us, my two girlfriends that I had met there, we walked to a cafe like we were in Paris. It was so beautiful. We sat outside. We just stayed for hours. Nobody checked a phone. Nobody was thinking about what was next. We just talked and wove through all of life’s stories, and it was so beautiful. I looked around at one point and realized I was sitting with women who are not rushing either. I don’t regret the
