Rumi said, “Don’t get lost in your pain”—here’s how I found beauty in slow, intentional living

There was a season in my life when I tried to outrun discomfort.

If I packed enough into a calendar, crossed off enough tasks, answered messages before they even landed, maybe I could get ahead of the ache I was carrying.

Spoiler: I couldn’t.

Busyness is a convincing anesthetic — right up until the moment it wears off and you’re left with the same pain you tried to avoid, only louder.

Rumi’s line — don’t get lost in your pain — didn’t tell me to deny it. It nudged me to stop letting pain be the map.

That’s where slow, intentional living started for me.

Not as an aesthetic (linen shirts, ceramic mugs, sunlit kitchens), but as a way of paying honest attention. Slowing down wasn’t about doing less for the sake of it; it was about removing the noise so I could hear what was already there.

Why I stopped outrunning my pain

For years, I treated life like a race with no finish line—just a series of personal bests.

I stacked responsibilities like Jenga blocks, terrified of what might spill out if I left a single space unfilled.

On paper, it looked great: productive, responsive, reliable. Inside, I felt like a tab with twenty hidden sub-tabs, all of them playing music I couldn’t locate.

The first moment I stopped was embarrassingly ordinary: I closed my laptop at 3 p.m. and sat on the floor.

No podcast. No “optimizing recovery.” Just breath and gravity.

What showed up wasn’t the catastrophe I expected — it was a quiet grief for the parts of myself I’d postponed.

That pause revealed a truth I’d been dodging: speed had become my shield. And shields are heavy.

When I set it down, pain had room to speak — but so did curiosity.

Slowness made everything audible, which is confronting at first and then, strangely, relieving. I didn’t need more hacks. I needed a different relationship to time.

The quiet rebellion of moving slower

Choosing to move more slowly in a fast culture feels like stepping out of a current that insists it knows what’s best for you.

People worry you’re losing your edge. They send you “must-read” threads on efficiency like care packages, as if slowness were an illness. But slowness isn’t the opposite of ambition; it’s ambition with discernment.

When I cut the performative urgency — the reflex to answer immediately, the reflex to say yes before I check in with myself — I didn’t become lazier.

I became precise.

The to-do list got shorter because the “why” behind each task got clearer.

The mornings stretched. I noticed light moving across the room, the way silence sometimes hums, the difference between hunger and habit.

Slowness made room for small rituals: boiling water as if it mattered, walking the same neighborhood loop until it felt like a friendly sentence I could recite by heart.

A slower pace didn’t erase pressure. It changed my posture under pressure — from braced and brittle to grounded and responsive. It turns out you can go far without sprinting if you’re aligned.

Pain as a messenger, not an enemy

If speed was my shield, pain was the thing I thought I had to conquer.

So I gamified it: push through, prove you’re stronger, don’t let it “win.”

That worked in the short term and wrecked me in the long term. The shift came when I treated pain like a messenger in a language I didn’t yet speak. Instead of “how do I kill this feeling?” the question became “what is this feeling trying to alert me to?”

Sometimes the messenger said, “You’re out of integrity with your values.” Sometimes it said, “You’re exhausted and pretending you’re not.” When I stopped moralizing discomfort, I could start learning from it.

As my friend Rudá Iandê writes in his newly released book, Laughing in the Face of Chaos, “Our emotions are not barriers, but profound gateways to the soul — portals to the vast, uncharted landscapes of our inner being.”

That line didn’t give me an escape hatch. It gave me a compass.

I still feel anxious, sad, impatient. The difference is I listen before I act, and I act from what listening reveals.

Listening to my body reset my calendar

I used to manage my body like a stubborn intern: ignore its suggestions, overload it, then expect brilliance on demand.

Slow living flipped that relationship.

The first practical change was embarrassingly simple: I started scheduling my day around energy instead of the clock.

Mornings for deep work while I’m clear; afternoons for admin when my brain wants autopilot; evenings for movement or stillness depending on what my body asks for.

That sounds privileged until you remember it’s mostly about micro-choices:

• Five minutes to check in before committing; 
• A glass of water instead of a third coffee;
• Stepping outside between meetings to let your nervous system breathe.

The body keeps score and it also keeps time.

When I treated sensations as data, not distractions, I stopped dragging a tired mind through tasks that deserved a rested one.

Rudá’s book didn’t teach me a new productivity framework — it reminded me to trust my biology. His insights encouraged me to swap “pushing through” for “tuning in,” and the surprising result was not less output but work that actually felt like mine.

Questioning speed, belief, and who I’m performing for

I’ve talked about this before, but the belief that speed equals value is one I inherited, not one I chose.

Family, school, startup culture — they all reward visible motion.

Slowing down asked me to interrogate the story underneath: who am I trying to impress, and what am I hoping they’ll give me when I do?

Approval is a moving target. You can chase it forever and never arrive.

When I questioned that pursuit, an odd freedom showed up.

If my worth isn’t calculated in sprints, I get to ask better questions: Is this how I want to spend the one life I have? Does this align with the person I’m becoming?

Rudá nudged me there again. In Laughing in the Face of Chaos, he insists that authenticity beats perfection every time, and that meaning grows from the inside out.

The book inspired me to stop performing wellness and start living with fewer filters.

Reality, it turns out, is more flexible than we think.

When I changed the belief that “busy = worthy,” the world responded — not because the world changed, but because the lens did.

Fewer obligations. Richer presence. More honest “no’s,” which made space for wholehearted “yes.”

What slow looks like in a fast world

Slowness isn’t a monastery (unless that’s your thing). It’s a series of choices that accumulate into a life.

Mine looks like single-tasking on purpose. It looks like leaving my phone in another room when I write, so my attention can be a home, not a hallway. It looks like cooking simple food and eating without a screen.

Or like choosing nature as a teacher — because trees don’t rush, and yet they grow.

I also anchor my week with what I call “uncomplicated rituals”: the same playlist when I deep work, the same mug for tea before bed, the same stretch sequence after runs.

Repetition, I’ve discovered, is not boring when you are present; it becomes a groove your nervous system can trust.

And when chaos spikes—as it does—these rituals are a rope back to myself. They don’t shield me from pain. They stop me from getting lost in it.

Final words

Slow, intentional living didn’t make my problems vanish — it gave me a way to meet them without dissolving.

Rumi’s invitation not to get lost in pain doesn’t deny suffering. It reminds us that pain is a waypoint, not a destination. The beauty I’m finding now is quiet: the way breath steadies thought, the way light changes the same room through a single day, the way honest boundaries return dignity to a schedule.

I still slip. I still sprint when I feel scared. But I return more quickly because I’m less interested in winning the race and more interested in knowing the runner.

If any of this resonates, you don’t need a dramatic reset. Start with one small act of attention you can repeat tomorrow.

Beauty isn’t hiding in the future version of you who “finally has it all together.” It’s waiting in the pace where you can hear yourself, and from there, choose.