I have loved the concept of slow living for a long time. Years ago, I imagined living on a little piece of land, having a big garden, and raising chickens and maybe even a few other livestock. I wanted to feel connected to nature not just through my career in wildlife and natural resources, but also at home. And I wanted it all to feel easy.

Fast forward to today. I work full time as a wildlife biologist, live on a small livestock farm with a big garden, am raising a growing family with the love of my life, and have more cozy hobbies than I can count. I still strive for the slow, seasonal lifestyle every day, season, and year, but life is busy, too. It's a balancing act that requires awareness and gentle correction when things start to shift from joyfully full to stressful.

When I look back on my personal journey into a slower pace of life, it's obvious the biggest shift happened when I became a mom. Before my son was born, I thought I had it figured out, but the postpartum reality check and the way my brain completely rewired my priorities as he grew created a clearer understanding of what slow living really means.

The Ambitious Type

I'm a typical ambitious woman. During graduate school, I worked extra jobs to expand my professional portfolio and explore how the natural resources field intersects with other fields like community development and regenerative agriculture. There were so many opportunities, and I wanted my hands in all of it.

It all worked. I landed my first full time job, then switched to a mix of multiple part-time jobs to continue expanding my experience, and eventually made it into the competitive federal workforce. I was driven by ambition but also a desire to stay true to my personal why: to create positive impact for wildlife and people.

By the time I had settled into a single full time, permanent job with the feds, I'd met and married my husband and we were figuring out what life as a new family of two could look like. Along the way, I'd also rediscovered and recommitted to my yoga practice, and that was the first space I started to understand and practice a slower pace.

Finding a Slower Pace Through Yoga

I first started going to yoga during college and continued practicing on and off for years using YouTube videos (a lot of Yoga with Adriene and Brett Larkin!). By 2019 and the end of graduate school, I had completely fallen in love with the practice.

In 2020, I set a goal to do yoga every single day. When the pandemic hit, that goal was one of the few I could actually stay committed to, since it had always been a personal, at-home practice for me. But by that time, I was entering my working-multiple-part-time-jobs phase and that alone was incredibly overwhelming. Tack on top a requirement to do yoga every day, and the yoga started to feel like a chore.

But I was committed to the daily yoga goal. At some point that year, I started looking for slower, gentler classes, because the more challenging flows I typically opted for were wearing me down, not supporting me. That's when I found yin yoga on Yoga with Kassandra's YouTube channel.

Yin is a style of yoga that focuses on long holds in postures typically closer to the ground. It is excellent for the joints and fascia and can be deeply relaxing. But staying still for an absolute bare minimum of two minutes in a single pose is the friction point. For someone who had been constantly moving and career-focused for years, spending 30 minutes barely moving on a yoga mat was a remarkable mental and emotional challenge.

But it unlocked something. The stillness shifted from difficult to tolerable to actually feeling good. It began to feel like a necessity in my day. And that was the start of the eventual turning point.

Understanding But Not Living My Yoga

Settling into a single, full time, permanent job in 2021 felt like a giant yogi exhale. I had one job, I valued the work, and I was good at it. It was around this time that I decided yoga teacher training was the right path for my spare time. I joined Brett Larkin's Uplifted Yoga School in her 200-hour online training.

Let me tell you something...Brett doesn't mess around with her expectations for her students. I dove head first into a rigorous training that encompassed much of my time out of work. While I loved every minute of it, I was right back in ambitious mode, feeding on the accomplishment of earning another credential.

My understanding of yoga, its depth, and the philosophy behind it deepened exponentially. I could feel the benefits of a slower practice on my mat, but looking back, it's clear I hadn't fully translated that practice, and my long held vision of a slow seasonal life, into my every day.

Motherhood as the Slow Living Gateway

By the time I was pregnant with my first child, my husband and I had moved across the country, bought our first home, I had been promoted at work, we were diving into implementing our homesteading dreams, and I had enrolled in the Uplifted Yoga School 300-hour online teacher training. Finally being on the farm (something we had dreamt about for years) reignited my desire to live along nature's rhythms and offered a tangible outlet to do just that, but I was clearly still operating from an achievement cycle.

The real shift came with my son. I had a wonderful birth experience with no complications and we brought our little boy home to the farm at just under 2 days old. Despite a smooth birth experience, I struggled to get around the house for the first couple of weeks, and naturally, I was exhausted from being up at night to nurse. When I took my son out for our first postpartum hike, I was easily out-strolled by a kind old fisherman. Life was officially slow.

Moms who have given birth know that experience is a breaking and that everything after is a rebuilding around something you never could have understood or imagined beforehand. My priorities shifted overnight. Did anything actually matter other than caring for my son and witnessing him grow and experience the world? It was crystal clear during those early postpartum months that being a present and content mother was my highest priority. And for me, that meant embracing a slow pace of living that allowed for easeful connection, calm presence, and quiet contentment in everyday family life.

Maternity leave ended and the busyness crept back in, but the way I approached my days had permanently shifted. Even amidst full-time work, home and farm chores, and mothering, I actively seek ways to remain grounded in what really matters and to hone my attention there.

It has been a wonderful journey to learn that what I cared deeply for before becoming a mother (nature, wild things, and how we can care for and integrate into them) can be expressed through my motherhood journey and not just my career.

Keep following along for practical tips on how to embrace slow motherhood through connection to nature, yoga, and meditation!

Start Your Own Slow Motherhood Journey

• The online yoga studio for busy, working moms seeking a slower way of life offers monthly pre-recorded yoga and meditation you can use to sink into a slower pace, plus a slow down framework where you can restructure your most overwhelming challenges into peaceful, rhythmic routines that support you and your family.

• Two-minute Reset Meditations for Routine Calm Days includes ten completely free two-minute meditations for you to capture a moment of calm right now, without spending an hour at the yoga studio or taking paid leave.

• The Mama Naturalist on my website and Substack is a space where I share both conceptual and practical guidance on slowing down, connecting to nature, and living seasonally.

• Mindful Moms Digest offers exclusive yoga and meditation classes, nature stories from a wildlife biologist (me!), and free, supportive resources including links back to every blog post for busy, working moms journeying toward a slower, more seasonal way of life.

• Cultivate Calm Mornings is a structured series of three yoga workshops that supports you in transforming your morning routine from chaotic to calm.