Agency Over Urgency
Not time management.
Agency over your own attention.
A 2-hour live mindfulness workshop for people who are done operating at a pace that was never theirs, and ready to find out what agency over their own attention actually feels like.
“Marie-Louise has created an inviting space where she generously shares her beautiful art, life experiences, and wonderfully grounding meditations. It is the perfect place to practice being fiercely human.”
Nance Scott-The Wellbeing Apothecary
Friday 24 April - 2pm BST
How it works
Greeting and short grounding practice
Journaling exercises to acknowledge your own relationship with time
Guided practice to ship perspective
Theoretical reframing
Visioning exercises to anchor the shift
Q&A session
We've all experienced the relativity of time.
Sit in the doctor's waiting room and 15 minutes feel like 3 hours. Meanwhile the 2-hour Arctic Monkeys concert didn't nearly last long enough.
That 5-minute daily meditation? Who's got time for that! Oops, you just spent 45 minutes doomscrolling the latest patriarchal nonsense the dudes of this planet just cooked up.
You know what I'm talking about.
It's slightly funny until you start getting serious — about your creative life, your mental health and wellbeing, your parenting, or even just this urge to actually feel yourself live a little.
The problem isn't your calendar. It isn't your discipline. It isn't that you haven't found the right system yet.
The problem is that urgency has become your default operating system.
And it was installed without your permission.
Most of what we call urgency isn't responding to genuine emergency.
It's a conditioned trance — running so quietly in the background that you stopped noticing it was there.
The culture of constant productivity needs you anxious and moving fast.
A mind scanning perpetually for the next thing is a mind that doesn't pause to ask whether any of it is actually yours.
Recognising that isn't a scheduling problem.
It asks for a different kind of response entirely.
You've tried planning systems. They help — until the urgency dismantles them
The pressure feels personal, like a character flaw, even though you know it probably isn't
Slowing down sounds obvious in theory; in practice, something in you resists it the moment life gets busy
How I made time work for me
Even though I'm used to questioning concepts — that's what philosophers do for a living — the concept of time always baffled me.
Before seriously questioning and reshaping my relationship with time, I spent almost two decades in a state of constant pressure, overwhelm, and emergency. At age 35 I had four children including a newborn, a business, and had just relocated from China to the UK.
I was always busy. Always on the move.
I didn't know how to rest because everything was a priority.
What I eventually discovered — through philosophy, through contemplative practice, through a lot of trial and error — wasn't a system. It was a reframe.
Urgency isn't a personality trait. It's something that was installed, gradually and without announcement, by every structure around you that benefits from your perpetual rushing.
When I interrupted it — genuinely, from the inside — something became available that hadn't been before.
Not a slower life, exactly. A life more mine.
“When I met Marie-Louise, I was in a moment of great confusion. I was scattering myself across strategies that exhausted me. She enabled me to build a guiding thread, to take action, all while respecting my pace and my values. I regained confidence and rediscovered my motivation, when I wasn't far from giving up.”
— Aurélie
What becomes possible
When you interrupt the urgency trance rather than managing around it:
Decisions come from discernment rather than pressure — you can tell the difference between what genuinely needs your attention now and what's just been made to feel urgent
Your creative work, your attention, and your nervous system have actual room to move
You unclench your jaw. Your projects get space to unfold
We don't need to do less.
We need to understand that we can choose our own pace,
and that it's allowed to fluctuate.
Agency isn't slowness.
It's authorship.
Introducing:
Agency Over Urgency
A 2-hour live workshop · 24 April 2026 · 2pm BST · Click to see more time zones
This is a facilitated 2-hour workshop for people who already sense that something is off about the urgency they're living inside, and want a framework for working with it, not managing around it.
I ran this work in person in January. What came out of that room confirmed something I'd suspected: the framework holds, and the conversations it opens are ones people have been waiting to have.
Not a time management workshop.
Not about doing more in less time.
About understanding where the urgency comes from:
philosophically
culturally
and in your own nervous system.
You choose what you actually want to act on,
and at what pace.
We move through contemplative practice, direct teaching, and structured reflection.
There is space to think.
There is space to not have it all figured out.
“Marie-Louise knows how to accurately sense others’ needs and support them concretely. Her approach is simultaneously reassuring, caring and structured. Thank you for your philosopher and artist’s vision. A unique and effective combination.”
This is right for you if…
You're building something — a creative practice, a life, work that needs to fit who you actually are — and the pace you're operating at doesn't match what you're building
You've done enough inner work to hold nuance without needing a formula to follow
Urgency has become your default setting and you're aware enough to know that isn't sustainable
You want to understand the structural and philosophical roots of your experience, not just the surface symptoms
You want to leave with something you can actually use — not a mindset shift, but a practice
What We’ll Work With
“This workshop was true self-reflection, exploring my positioning and how to present myself authentically. Everyone was able to progress at their own pace. Marie-Louise was attentive to what suits me, all within a caring environment.”
01
Patterns
02
Presence
03
Pace
The philosophy of urgency: where it comes from, what it serves, and who benefits from your perpetual rushing.
A contemplative practice to identify the difference between genuine responsiveness and conditioned urgency in your own lived experience
The concept of agency as something practised in the body, not just decided in the mind
A framework for interrupting the urgency trance in real time, not as a productivity tool, but as a consciousness practice
Guided reflection on where your attention is currently governed by urgency, and what becomes possible when it isn't
This isn’t right for you if…
You're looking for a productivity system or a way to reorganise your schedule
You want to be told exactly what to do
You're in a period of acute crisis — the work asks for a certain groundedness to be useful
You're uncomfortable with philosophical framing or with sitting in questions before reaching answers
About me
I'm a philosopher, artist, and mindfulness teacher based in the south of France. My master's is in Ethics, specialising in Care Ethics — which means I've spent a long time thinking seriously about how we treat ourselves and each other inside systems that weren't designed with our wellbeing in mind.
My mindfulness teaching is in the Insight tradition (graduating with Tara Brach and Jack Kornfield), and it's neurodivergent-informed — meaning we work with how nervous systems actually function, not how productivity culture thinks they should.
I've also lived inside the problem this workshop addresses: the two decades of constant pressure, the four children, the business, the relocations, the jaw permanently clenched. I'm not teaching from a position of having solved it. I'm teaching from the position of having found tools that actually work, and a framework for why they work.
“I love her personal approach, enriched by knowledge that goes well beyond the tools of personal development. I will keep and use her method very carefully”
FAQs
Do I need to have an established meditation or journaling practice to join? How accessible are the teachings?
1
You don't need an existing meditation practice, and you don't need to have worked with these ideas before. What you do need is a certain willingness to sit with honest reflection rather than jump to solutions. If you've started asking the questions this workshop addresses, you're ready.
Will there be a recording?
2
Yes! All registered participants receive the recording after the session, with no time limit on access.
How is this different from therapy or coaching?
3
It's neither. This is a facilitated workshop — teaching, contemplative practice, and group reflection. I'm not working with your personal history or providing ongoing support within this format. If what surfaces in the workshop raises things you'd like to explore further, I offer individual advising sessions separately.
How much time does this require outside the 2 hours?
4
Just the 2 hours. No pre-reading, no homework. What you take away is yours to use in your own time, at your own pace, which is rather the point.
Is this religious or spiritual?
5
The contemplative practices are rooted in the secular Insight meditation tradition. The philosophical framework draws on phenomenology and care ethics. No prior spiritual framework or belief system is required. Only a willingness to sit still for periods and reflect honestly, and a taste for journaling.
Yes, occasionally. Discount codes must be applied at the time of registration and cannot be added retrospectively. Each code is valid for one registration only.
If this work feels right for you and the price is a genuine barrier, get in touch. I'll figure something out.
Do you offer discount codes?
6
What you’re getting:
Agency Over Urgency
is a live 2-hour facilitated workshop
on 24 April 2026 at 2pm BST
2 hours live
via zoomRecording of the full session,
yours to keepPhilosophical teaching on urgency, conditioning, and agencyGuided contemplative practiceStructured reflection and group work
€49.00
A Closing Note
Urgency will tell you there isn't time for this.
That's exactly the kind of thing urgency says.
Two hours to look clearly at what's driving your pace, and to find out whether you're the one setting it.
If you want to unclench your jaw and give your projects some space to unfold,
the button is below.Friday 24 April - 2pm BST
