Why You (Probably) Won’t Read This
Through social media, click-bait and other quick dopamine hits in the digital world, we’ve inadvertently created an existence that values speed over slowness, consumption over creation and adrenaline over peace. This rapid-fire nature often reduces complex ideas to oversimplified soundbites, leaving little room for nuance or deeper exploration.
This does not mean that the healing comfort of calm, lush adventures of depth or curious exploration through nuance is out of our reach.
Here’s why many will not read this :
It’s not consumable within 5–15 seconds.
It won’t give you a quick dopamine hit or a neatly packaged takeaway.
Your brain thinks it already knows what this is—another post about rest, solitude, or some personal revelation—so it seeks something else, something faster.
You’re likely rush-scrolling between meetings, texts, or half-listening to a podcast.
But if you do stay, if you let yourself slow down enough to read this, I promise you’ll feel… better :)
I just spent five days alone in a remote cabin in Remsen, NY. No meetings, no notifications, no conversations. No work. No dogs. Just me, the woods, my notebook and the quiet. It was my first true solo trip in over two years—not for work, not for obligation, but for myself.
I went with a few intentions:
• To become more familiar with the strain of psilocybin my patients use in ceremony—not as a clinician, not as an expert, but as a human being experiencing what they experience.
• To remind my body of what slow actually FEELS like. To “contact the reinforcement of going slowly”, a behavior analyst would say. Cooking meals that took over an hour. Walking at half speed. Drinking my morning latte twice as slowly. Doing everything in double the time I’m used to, not to delay life, but to swim in it.
• To experience solitude without a task or purpose—no emails, no tending to anyone or anything. Just me, being.
• To celebrate the last 16 months—months spent in masculine energy, executing, enduring, pushing through as my world shifted again and again. To honor my resilience, and then let it rest.
At first, the stillness was jarring. The impulse to do something, to fill space, to check in, was relentless. Luckily, I am practiced at these solo retreats, having spent 100 days in a log cabin during a transformational sabbatical leading to what EXPANDED is today. After 24, and then 48, hours something shifted. My nervous system exhaled. My thoughts softened. I started to listen. To the fire crackling. To the wind through the trees. To my own breath slowing down.
There was no grand epiphany, no earth-shattering realization. But there were insights I hold dear. There were profound moments of remembering and returning to myself. And I came home re-oriented my center.
So if you’ve made it this far, maybe this is what you needed to hear today. Maybe your brain was looking for something fast, but your soul needed something slow.
Maybe this is your sign to stop scrolling and step away for a while, just to enjoy the feeling of 5 deep breaths. Because the best things in life aren’t the ones you consume in an instant. They’re the ones you have to be in long enough to feel.
