The Art of Slowing Down
- 3 days ago
- 5 min read
Updated: 10 hours ago
Mwanaidi Kombo, also known as Munno, is the Founder of Divine Wellness Global and a visionary in holistic and integrative wellness. Through her work, she advances mind-body-soul alignment and culturally responsive wellness frameworks that empower individuals and communities globally.
There was a time when I believed growth meant constant movement. If my calendar was full, my business was expanding, and new opportunities kept arriving, I assumed I was moving in the right direction. As entrepreneurs, we are conditioned to believe that momentum is everything. We celebrate the long hours, the consecutive flights, the ability to juggle multiple responsibilities, and the resilience to keep going no matter how exhausted we become. I believed that too. Looking back, I realize I wasn’t just building Divine Wellness. I was building a version of myself that believed slowing down was something successful people simply couldn’t afford.
For years, my life revolved around serving others. Every decision I made carried weight because it affected not only me but also my team, my clients, and the vision I had dedicated my life to creating. Divine Wellness was growing beyond anything I had imagined. We were welcoming more clients, expanding our services, creating new experiences, and dreaming bigger than ever before. It was everything I had prayed for. Yet somewhere in the middle of all that growth, I quietly stopped asking myself a question that now feels so obvious: How is the person leading all of this actually doing?
The answer was uncomfortable. From the outside, I looked successful. Inside, I felt disconnected. Not because I had fallen out of love with my work, but because I had spent so much time responding to the needs of everyone around me that I no longer knew how to respond to my own. Every day demanded another decision, another meeting, another problem to solve, and another vision to communicate. I had become incredibly skilled at holding space for other people while slowly losing the ability to hold space for myself.
Years before, life had already tried to teach me this lesson. A serious accident forced me to stop in ways I never would have chosen for myself. Recovery demanded patience, humility, and a willingness to accept that healing could not be rushed. I learned to respect my body’s timeline, but once I was physically able, I did what many founders do. I returned to work determined to make up for lost time. I threw myself back into building, convinced that resilience meant getting back to business as quickly as possible. It never occurred to me that healing isn’t only physical.
Sometimes the body recovers long before the mind and spirit have had the chance to catch up. That realization stayed quietly in the background until years later, when I found myself making another decision that many people misunderstood. I relocated to Bali.
To most people, it looked like I was taking a break. Friends imagined beaches, cafés, sunsets, and an extended holiday. Social media has a way of turning places into fantasies, and Bali is no exception. But I wasn’t moving there because I needed another destination. I moved because I had reached a point where I could no longer ignore the growing distance between the life I was living and the person I felt myself becoming. I wasn’t searching for a new country. I was searching for enough silence to hear my own thoughts again.
What surprised me most about Bali wasn’t its beauty. It was its pace. On my first morning, I woke before sunrise, opened the curtains, and stood in complete stillness. Mist rested gently over the rice fields. The air carried the scent of incense from the morning offerings that appeared outside homes before the day had begun, and somewhere in the distance, I could hear roosters announcing a sunrise that nobody seemed to be rushing toward.
The island didn’t feel lazy. It felt intentional. Nothing appeared to be competing for attention. People moved with purpose, not urgency. Watching that simple rhythm made me realize how foreign stillness had become in my own life. I had spent so many years measuring the value of a day by how much I accomplished that I had forgotten there was another way to measure it, by how present I had actually been while living it.
At first, I brought my old habits with me. I answered emails overlooking rice terraces. I scheduled meetings between walks. I reached for my phone every few minutes, almost instinctively, afraid that if I disconnected for too long, something important would fall apart. The scenery had changed, but my mind hadn’t. It took weeks before I understood that changing your environment doesn’t automatically change your relationship with yourself. That work happens much more slowly.
As the weeks passed, something began shifting inside me. I stopped walking with a destination and started walking simply because I wanted to observe. I noticed the women preparing flower offerings every morning with remarkable care, even though many of them would disappear within hours. I watched rain arrive without apology, drenching the streets before disappearing as quickly as it came. I watched waves reach the shore again and again without ever rushing to become the next one. Nature wasn’t trying to outperform yesterday. It simply trusted its own rhythm. Somewhere between those ordinary moments, I began questioning why I had believed leadership required me to live any differently.
Every morning, before I spoke to my team or opened my laptop, I opened my journal. At first, I wrote because my mind felt crowded. There were thoughts I hadn’t had time to process, emotions I had postponed because there was always something more urgent to deal with, and questions I had buried beneath productivity. Those pages became the quietest conversations I had experienced in years. They reminded me of the woman I had been before the endless responsibilities, but they also introduced me to the woman I was becoming.
Looking back now, I realize I wasn’t simply documenting my days. I was witnessing my own transformation in real time. Those private pages would later become the inspiration behind The Divine Journal, but long before they became something I could share with others, they became the place where I finally met myself again.
The greatest gift that season gave me wasn’t rest. It was perspective. When I eventually looked at Divine Wellness again, I no longer saw a business that depended on how much I could personally carry. I saw something much bigger. I saw the possibility of building an ecosystem where healing didn’t begin and end with me, where practitioners could thrive, where communities could find support, and where leadership meant creating opportunities for others to do meaningful work. My vision expanded because I finally had enough space to think beyond survival and toward legacy.
Today, I no longer see slowing down as the opposite of ambition. I see it as one of ambition’s greatest protectors. There are seasons when life asks us to move quickly, and there are seasons when it quietly invites us to become still. The wisdom lies in knowing the difference. My strategic pause did not delay my vision. It deepened it. It reminded me that the strongest leaders are not those who never stop, but those who understand that sustainable growth begins with a leader who is willing to pause long enough to become the person their next chapter requires.
Read more from Mwanaidi Swaleh Kombo
Mwanaidi Swaleh Kombo, Founder & Global Wellness Visionary
Mwanaidi Kombo, also known as Munno, is the Founder of Divine Wellness Global and a visionary in holistic and integrative wellness. Her path was shaped by adversity, following a life-altering injury and one of the darkest seasons of her life that challenged her physically, emotionally, and spiritually. Through holistic healing practices, she restored her strength and realigned her purpose, transforming personal survival into a greater mission. Today, she leads Divine Wellness as a global movement rooted in mind-body-soul alignment and culturally responsive, preventative wellness frameworks that empower individuals and communities globally.
