When you’re moving at the speed of wind, you can’t feel it.

Yesterday I sat for hours, captivated. Across the frozen lake, snow whipped into whirling dervishes outside my window. Glistening. Gusting in multiple directions. Spectacular.

From the warm perch of my friend’s bedroom, I settled into a stillness—the rare kind that comes packaged in six-degree temps and nowhere to be. No calls. No agenda. Just the snow and me.

And in that stillness, I caught something.

I was only watching. All that beauty swirling around me—and I’d shown up with one sense. Eyes open, everything else idle. Immersed in observing the experience instead of having it.

This is what we do with our lives.

We move so fast that we never give ourselves permission to be still. And on the rare occasion we do stop, we show up with a fraction of ourselves, watching, analyzing, narrating, instead of fully inhabiting the moment.

When’s the last time you didn’t just observe something beautiful… but merged with it and let it move through you?

In two decades as a business psychologist working with high-performing professionals, I’ve seen this pattern so consistently that I gave it a name: shallowing. It’s adaptive—until it isn’t.

Shallowing is the gradual, often unconscious way we narrow our emotional range. Through years of coping, adapting, and performing, we learn to compress our felt experience into a thin, manageable band. We mute the lows to survive. And without realizing it, we mute the highs right along with them.

If emotions were sounds, think of what we’ve practiced: containing the uncomfortable ones. Something painful happens—a loss, a rejection, a season of relentless pressure—and we instinctively turn down the volume. Smart move. Except the dial doesn’t have separate controls for grief and joy. When we turn away from sadness, we turn away from wonder. When we numb disappointment, we dismiss delight.

We can’t selectively feel.

What starts as short-term protection becomes a way of life.........

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