It's time to take life less hurriedly, according to the people behind a festival of slow living. Róisín Ingle hears how to go down a gear

Satish Kumar is not a man who can be hurried. In the 1960s he embarked on a peace walk from the grave of Mahatma Gandhi, in his home country of India, all the way to that of John F. Kennedy, in the US. This pilgrimage over land and sea took two years. So rather than travel by aircraft to speak at the fifth annual Convergence festival in Dublin next month he'll take the scenic route by train and ferry from his home in England. "Slow," the 67-year-old editor of Resurgence magazine says by way of explanation, "is beautiful."

The title of his lecture - and the theme of this year's sustainable-living festival - is Slow Down, Go Further. The programme was launched this week in a flurry of organic wine and slow-food canapés in Temple Bar. Appropriately, the invites came in the form of speeding tickets. "The increasing pace of our lifestyle has led to costs to the environment and society. . . . Your fine is 116,470 euro," they read. The small print says that should you dispute the fine "the trial would be held in your own conscience".

Kumar, a former Jainist monk, is evangelical when it comes to urging people to relax and slow down. "We are so busy all the time that we have become human doings rather than human beings," he says. "When you are just being, you are at ease with yourself, you take time over things, you are relaxed. The opposite to this is the frantic activity that characterises much of the Western world today."

Speed is not necessarily a strength, he says, despite our preoccupation with going faster and doing more. "I see slowness as a strength actually; speed is a weakness. In politics a lot of serious decisions affecting thousands of people are made rashly, in the heat of the moment, without enough reflection. We see speed as a way to impress people. Ah, look how quickly I made this decision. But how does a tree grow? You hardly notice it. Nature is a fine teacher when it comes to these matters."

Kumar was just nine when he became a Jainist monk in his home state of Rajasthan, in north-western India. As a monk he lived the homeless life for nine years, travelling barefoot with others from his strict order, his only possessions a begging bowl and a change of clothes. "I was on a spiritual quest. I have always been looking to know who I am rather than looking to see what I could become," he says. "You can become a doctor or a lawyer, and that is good, but it's important also to know that you are more than that. You are some kind of extraordinary being. You can aim higher than doctor or lawyer. Like the Buddha or Jesus you can aim for peace and fulfilment."

At 18 he came across a book by Gandhi that made him question his monastic path. "Gandhi's idea," says Kumar, "was rather than escape from the material world we should try and spread this slow, spiritual, non-violent philosophy into everyday life." By that time Gandhi had been assassinated; inspired by the pacifist nevertheless, Kumar left his order and joined the movement.

He became a follower of Vinoba Bhave, a respected Gandhian who spent his days walking from village to village, asking Indian landlords to donate some of their land to the poor. Between 1957 and 1962 Bhave and his followers walked 100,000 miles, collecting four million acres of land. "It was something like a miracle," says Kumar.

In his mid-20s he became aware of Bertrand Russell, the British philosopher, Nobel laureate and peace activist sent to jail in 1961 for civil disobedience. With a friend he set off on a peace pilgrimage from India to the US, stopping in Moscow, Paris, London and Washington to highlight their opposition to nuclear weapons. When they arrived in London Russell gave them tickets for the Queen Mary passenger ship, as the pair refused to handle money during the two-year trip. "We could have flown to Washington from Delhi in 12 hours and remembered none of it. But slow walking from India I remember every story from every day," he says.

Kumar has edited Resurgence, a magazine focusing on ecological, spiritual and economic issues, for 30 years, since he was invited to England by the late E. F. Schumacher, author of the seminal collection of environmental essays Small Is Beautiful.

A sultan of slow, Kumar offers some practical advice for those of us, including politicians, who find it impossible to step down a gear. "Everyone, especially people like Bertie Ahern, should learn to bake bread. It's a process that you cannot rush, and you have to go slow to get it right," he says. He suggests doing everything as slowly as possible. Slow gardening. Slow cooking. Slow reading. Slow commuting. Even slow socialising. By this he means taking the time to chat to your neighbours, especially ones whose names you don't even know. "Slow down," he says. "You will go further than you ever imagined."

Slow food

We spend an average of 20 minutes preparing our evening meal, using ingredients that may have travelled a couple of thousand miles before landing on our tables.

Statistics such as these spawned the slow-food movement across Europe, which champions fresh, wholesome, local food. Today is the beginning of the second annual Slow Food Ireland National Weekend, in Kenmare, Co Kerry, which celebrates everything from local black pudding to the humble rasher sandwich.

Gerard Cannon, a slow-food enthusiast from Dublin, says we should start asking more questions and looking a little closer at what goes into our supermarket trolleys if we want to make the switch from fast to slow food. "Where has it come from? How was it made? Is it in season? And if it's not in season then why is it sitting in your supermarket looking so fabulously ripe?" he says. "We need to do a lot more complaining and we need to stop mumbling under our breath about that lettuce that looks like it was kicked through a hedge. We need to stand up for ourselves and start looking retailers in the eye."

See www.slowfoodireland.com

Slow exercise

Even though most people are familiar with yoga and t'ai chi, we still tend to exercise as fast as we can. "People are trudging on a treadmill, staring at Sky News, being blasted by loud, offensive music and being bored silly," says Jan Golden, who runs Tai Chi Ireland in Dublin.

He instead advocates slow gentle movements to release tension and stress from the body and mind. "They allow full expression of the body and mind's potential through movement with full awareness and a sense of being present," he says.

Learning how to breathe properly is key. "You learn to breathe deeply, especially on the exhale, and this can slow the heart down and smooth out the central nervous system, where most stress resides."

Dublin Buddhist Centre is having to turn people away from meditation courses, which emphasise breathing, so popular have they become. "We get calls from people who are extremely stressed at work or in their personal lives and want to slow down and create some space for themselves," says a spokesman.

See www.taichi-ireland.com and www.dublinbuddhistcentre.org

Slow fashion

Forget identikit fashions, big-name designers, anonymous stores and being part of the crowd. With slow fashion you come face to face with the person who made your clothes and pick up one-off items you won't see anybody else wearing. With slow fashion a trip to Oxfam replaces a depressing trawl through an impersonal shopping centre. School uniforms are recycled, quirky buttons collected and utterly original fashion statements made. That's the idea behind what is thought to be the world's first slow-fashion show, taking place at SS Michael & John's church, in Temple Bar, as part of the Convergence festival next month. Maya Derrington of the Cow's Lane fashion market says the emphasis will be on showcasing the individuality of clothes made by stall-holders. "We want to reinvigorate fashion, make it more street than high street," she says.

The design collective Mash are the creative directors behind what they are calling the Mannequin Parade, after the old-fashioned name for catwalk shows. The catalogue will come in the form of a pattern, so that everyone in the audience can have a go at making their own slow fashions. As part of the show, Bay Garnett, editor of the trailblazing New York thrift magazine Cheap Date, is due to style five outfits sourced at charity shops around Dublin.

See www.sustainable.ie

Slow business

There's no business like it, according to those in the know. "We are slaves to the in-box, and that needs to change," says Dermot Rice of Priority Management, in Co Meath, who, after years being tied to his executive desk from 7 a.m. to 9 p.m., now heads a business that aims to free stressed-out employers and employees from the tyranny of corporate life.

This doesn't mean slacking off, he insists. "The aim is to work smarter but not harder. We encourage people to step back from what they are doing, to stop trying to put out all the fires at once and to plan their day effectively, so they can get their tasks done within normal working hours," he says. "It's inevitable that people will then gain more control and achieve a better work-life balance."

The Natural Step UK is an organisation in England that is also helping big business shift its approach. With clients that include McDonald's and Nike, Mark Cahill, its chief executive, says it encourages companies to integrate sustainability principles into their bottom line.

Priority Management is at 01-8359946

Slow future

Technology was supposed to make our working lives easier, but we seem to have less time for time out than ever. Thankfully, not all technological advances leave us working harder - and, incredibly, some of them are even designed to help us relax.

A few years ago at Media Lab Europe, in Dublin, Gary McDarby and his research team created a computer game called Relax To Win. It's a two-player dragon-racing game in which electrodes are attached to the players' fingers and the game's characters walk, run and eventually take flight the more the players relax. The game was developed to help children with anxiety but could also reduce office stress.

Now the Mind Games research group at Media Lab Europe is putting the finishing touches to a musical project called Composed Peace, which works in a similar way to Relax To Win. The application uses biometrics to control which parts of a piece of music listeners are able to hear. The more they relax, the more of the music is revealed, layer by layer, starting with a bass line and continuing until the chilled-out listeners have a symphony playing in their ears. "In one sense we are at the mercy of the technology we have created, where it seems that human connections are not as important as digital connections any more," says McDarby. "But the good news is that we can also use technology to turn this situation around."

The Convergence sustainable-living festival runs from April 22nd to May 2nd, in Dublin. More details from www.sustainable.ie