Work Hours 10:00am to 3:30pm
Call: +254 722 790 479
e-mail: therapy@onyangootieno.com

Slow Down, Slow Down: Healing the mind

Slow Down, Slow Down: Healing the mind

The goal is:

Slow down. Even if you got all the answers today you wouldn’t be able to hurry time.

There is more to your faith or lack of it than what they’ve written in religious books. Search for it. Have you heard of the Dead Sea Scrolls of 1946/7? They found more books that were not included in the Bible you know. I particularly love the Gospel of Thomas. 114 sayings of Jesus. Beautiful stuff. Do you know how Islam began? Search for it. Someone wrote a book called “The Book of Adam and Eve”. Are you a Christian because you were born in a Christian family? Have you ever heard of the Essenes?

Take a deep breath in the middle of a hard day. Share a smile at the beginning of a good morning.

There are bigger stars than the sun. Mu Cephi is about 1500 times its size. Learn about snow crystals even when you’re not certain you’ll ever witness them fall. In essence, what you know is not everything there is. Do not make your world small by flourishing in your ignorance. It doesn’t matter how many degrees you have or what salary you get.

Have you ever thought who teaches babies that smiling represents jolly and crying expresses pain? Right. Your knowledge is not ultimate. Even that of yourself. 80% of the brain is water. Hydrate. Your left lung is smaller than your right lung to make room for your heart. Every tongue print is unique. 50,000 cells in your body died and were replaced by new ones while you were reading this sentence. The human eye can distinguish 10 million different colours. See how beautiful you are. Yet there is much more you should find out about yourself.

24 hours is a long time. In that frame, someone is:
– giving birth
– thinking of a hate tweet
– plotting a terror attack
– writing their dream down
– being formed in their mother’s womb
– running from the cops
– explaining themselves in a court of law
– dying
– boarding a flight
– learning a new language
– attending their first class in their lives
– stress eating
– succumbing to depression
– under operation in a hospital theatre
– watching porn
– getting into a relationship
– losing a job
– fetching water in a borehole
– thinking about you
– and God knows what.

Math is everything. Maybe it’s the way they teach it in our schools that’s the problem. Like they do poetry. Believe me. You may not know it but your brain is always calculating. In fact, it is even more active when you are asleep. The sun does not rise, the sun does not set. It’s the earth that moves. 15 degrees per hour. So when you see the sun go down, you are part of a movement heading towards tomorrow. Math is poetry.

There is more to sex than foreplay and penetration. Math is poetry. Remember. Be deliberate about your moves on someone. Teach yourself. Focus on quality. A woman has twice as many nerve endings on her clitoris than men have on their whole penis.

Friedrich Nietzsche said, “We should consider every day lost on which we have not danced at least once.”

Music is a big deal. Listen to sounds and compositions from different cultures and time. You’ll meet people who’ll take you back to places within yourself you hadn’t thought existed.

The joy I have found in reading is that ability to save my soul. For in wanting to know and meeting people’s minds in words, my thoughts, beliefs, and general mental makeup have been shaped. Read. Never let your brain settle.

Doubt and question. Doubt helps you ask the right questions. Doubt everything to believe in anything. Only then can you attempt to explain why you choose the paths you take.

Travel all you can. If not physically, at least through people’s stories. Don’t sit on the stories you were taught only. People are music. Keep discovering them out.
Your tribe is a very small part of you. Consider what it took your ancestors to migrate so that your family lineage could survive. Don’t waste that struggle in tribalism and cynicism.

What you eat directly affects your mental health. Find out what serotonin is and its essential role in your body.

And lastly for today, greet somebody.

Onyango Otieno

Onyango Otieno is a cultural designer ardent in maximizing the power of storytelling for healing and connection. Onyango believes in the potent spirit of humanity collectively creating safe spaces for interaction, development, business and movement, for a more cohesive world.

Leave a Reply