Permission to Rest

Each year at this time, I can begin to feel myself winding down, a deep, soul desire to begin the long path to winter. Our culture is asking us to ramp up right now, preparing for back-to-school and lots of activities, sports are returning and holiday planning gets underway. I find myself thinking about what I want to bake for Thanksgiving and Christmas, dishes I didn’t get to last year or flavors that I’d like to incorporate.

And yet, underneath all the planning and the messages about busyness is the familiar longing of this time of year. I felt it even as a child—a wistful nostalgia for quiet, for fallen leaves under foot on the paths near my home. For candles and extra blankets, and simmering soups on the stove.

Each January, I take short sabbatical—a time for reflection of the previous four seasons and a time to honor my own needs for rest and integration. I’ve been doing this for a few years now and each year it feels a little bumpy, to be honest. For the first few days I’m aware of a low-grade discomfort with stopping. I’m often still humming with overstimulation of the holiday season and my compulsion to productivity sometimes takes me out of rest. So, my thoughts have been circling around the idea of permission to rest, of rest as a necessity and a way of life.

Some religious traditions refer to this as Sabbath, a time set aside for rest, pleasure and reflection. And I’ve been thinking about this and how desperate we all are for permission to view rest as an integral part of our well-being. Not the “rest” of a zoned-out Netflix binge, or the “rest” of a big vacation, but a rest that fills our bodies and souls with the deep knowledge, the experience that we are enough and that all will be well.

For some, this experience of rest is uncomfortable or even terrifying. Many of us are afraid to slow down, fearful of what we may discover. We are living within an aggressive cultural narrative of productivity, defended against rest and any underlying feelings that may be asking for our care and attention. We are moving through our days with anxiety, grief or an acute tenderness because we’re locked in dissociative states of fight, flight or freeze.

These experiences uniquely ask that we begin to rest slowly, in gentle, small moments, giving our bodies and souls a break from the volume of daily inputs in modern life. These slow, gentle moments might be a walk, an hour with the phone in a drawer, a breathwork meditation while waiting in the school pick-up line. Slowly and with great compassion, over time, we teach our body that rest is safe and that we are welcomed and held. We discover that we are able to hold our experiences, feelings and thoughts, and that we can care for ourselves in difficult times. We then expand this to longer times of rest and integration.

This form of rest is an active practice that requires a deep commitment to honoring our needs, to welcoming all that rises within us and to staying with our discomfort as we deepen into stillness. It asks that we be courageous, letting go of social norms and moving into deeper ways of trusting ourselves and caring for our needs.

When we value the rest that comes with slowing down, we release the grip of overparticipation and trust in the unfolding of life. Resting asks that we release expectations of ourselves to be any way other than what we are—grieving, sick, exhausted or burned out. Resting asks that we trust that we will be held. That we will find our way home from the wild.