The ache of overwhelm and the courage to slow down
For the past several days, I’ve felt a particular weight in my chest—subtle at first, but persistent, like something sitting just beneath my sternum, asking to be acknowledged. It wasn’t pain exactly, and it wasn’t anxiety in the way we often speak about it. It was closer to a tightness that moved with me, something that accompanied me from task to task, from room to room, from screen to screen. And though I could function, though I could work and speak and do what life asked of me, I was also—somewhere deep inside—struggling to breathe.
This sensation of overwhelm is not new. It has returned to me many times throughout my life, usually when the demands of the external world begin to multiply faster than my internal world can process. And each time it returns, I am tempted by the same reflex: speed up. Act faster. Move. Do something. Find momentum and ride it until the pressure subsides. But what I’ve come to realize—again and again—is that this response doesn’t actually relieve the overwhelm. It only postpones it. It pushes it down and outward, where it waits until the next moment of stillness, at which point it reappears, often more insistent than before.
Overwhelm, for me, is not simply an emotional state. It is a physiological shift. My body contracts. My breath becomes shallow. My chest tightens and my shoulders lift. My mind starts to search for efficiency. I lose the ability to access the slower, wiser, more grounded parts of myself. I become reactive instead of reflective. Everything becomes urgent, even when it isn’t. I feel as if I’m inside a tunnel, and the only way out is through movement—fast, instinctual, impulsive movement. But today, something was different. Today, I didn’t run from it. I didn’t act. I sat down and listened.
And what I heard, or perhaps what I remembered, was this: overwhelm is often the signal that you are abandoning yourself.
It comes when you’ve crossed a threshold of self-forgetting. When your attention has turned so completely toward external demands—toward deadlines, toward roles, toward people’s expectations—that the internal voice, the one that calls you to integrity, begins to fade into the background. This voice does not shout. It never forces itself upon you. It waits. And when we fail to slow down long enough to listen, that voice grows quiet—not because it is gone, but because we have moved too far from where it can reach us.
Today, as I sat with that part of myself—the overwhelmed, breathless child who learned long ago that speed was safer than stillness—I saw a memory surface. Not a literal one, not a clear image with identifiable people or places, but a felt sense of what it meant, at some early point in life, to be powerless. To witness the world happen around me without the capacity to shape it. To know that something was wrong, or frightening, or too much, and to have no tools to change it. That is the archetype that lives in the body of every child who has ever been helpless. And for those of us who carry that early experience—whether remembered clearly or not—it doesn’t go away. It resurfaces when life begins to resemble that chaos again, when we feel we’re being pulled by events beyond our control, even if they are good, even if they are chosen.
The speed of modern life often disguises itself as purpose. We believe we’re moving quickly because we are driven, because we are responsible, because we are needed. And perhaps those things are true. But speed is also a trauma response. It is a way of avoiding pain, of staying ahead of the voice within that says, You’re tired. You’re lost. You’re carrying too much and listening too little.
So today I stopped running—literally and metaphorically. I had gone for a jog through the forest near my home, a ritual I often return to when I feel myself fraying at the edges. The trails were soft with pine needles and damp earth, the canopy above just beginning to turn from spring to early summer. I ran until I couldn’t anymore, and then I walked. The light filtered through the trees in long, broken strands, like the breath of something ancient. The scent of wildflowers and birch filled the air. Birds sang above me in call and response. And I realized, with a kind of aching clarity, that I was not just in the forest—I was being called by it. Called to slow down. Called to be still. Called to let go of the rhythm of urgency and to reenter the rhythm of the soul.
There is a part of me that has always known this truth. A part that appeared somewhere in adolescence, or perhaps even earlier, though I lacked the words to understand it at the time. This part is older, wiser, slower. It doesn’t strive. It doesn’t panic. It waits. It watches. It listens. And it reminds me that unless I learn to live from this place—unless I honor this slowness as sacred—I will not only burn out, I will forget who I am. I will become efficient, perhaps even successful, but hollow. Outwardly capable, but inwardly disconnected.
This, I believe, is the silent epidemic of our time: people who have interiorized the expectations of others so thoroughly that they no longer know where their desires come from. They believe they are pursuing their dreams, when in fact they are reenacting scripts written long ago by parents, cultures, institutions, or wounds. They achieve, they build, they create, but they do not ask: Why am I doing this? What pain am I avoiding? What part of myself is being left behind in the process?
And here—midway through the trees, ankle-deep in moss and birdsong—I remembered a line from the Gospel of Thomas that I first encountered years ago but which seems to reveal itself to me more with each season of life:
“If you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save you.
If you do not bring forth what is within you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you.” (Gospel of Thomas, Saying 70)
It’s a terrifyingly true line. And it is not a metaphor. If we do not learn to live in communion with the deep, often inconvenient truths within us—our ache, our longing, our sacred dissatisfaction—then what we silence will eventually rise as illness, anxiety, chronic tension, spiritual dryness, or unspoken grief. The very thing we bury will come back, not to punish us, but to ask again: Will you listen now?
This is where the spiritual traditions still have something essential to teach us. The Ignatian practice of examen—the daily reflection on where one felt near to or far from the presence of God—is not a relic of another era, but a method of self-reconnection. The Hesychasts of the Eastern Christian tradition, who sat in silence and watched the breath, were not engaging in esoteric mysticism for its own sake. They were reclaiming their humanity through the quiet, through the refusal to be dictated by the external world. Even in secular therapeutic models today, the emphasis on interoception—the act of listening inwardly to the body’s signals—is another version of this ancient wisdom: that truth does not come from reaction, but from reflection.
And so I find myself returning again and again to this simple but difficult truth: that a sacred life is a slow life. Not slow in the sense of inactivity or retreat, but slow in the sense of attentiveness. Of listening. Of living close to the pulse of one’s own being. I am preparing, in many ways, for a life of ministry, of spiritual leadership, of guiding others into themselves. But I cannot do that with integrity unless I first make room to be guided inward, day after day, into the depths where my own fears and hopes, my own wounds and callings, live.
Because if I do not bring it forth, it will destroy me.
That is the truth I am learning.
That is the truth I am trying to live.
And maybe, just maybe, it is the truth that is calling you too.
If this resonates, share it with one person you love.
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