Winter: An Invitation to Rest
If you go on social media, you might notice the newest trend of videos: montages of what people do in a day. It’s glossy, filtered footage that shows the routine of a productive person. Maybe it’s a morning workout, mindfulness time and journaling, a green juice, a day of work, an evening with friends. It could be a parent who manages to fit in personal time, exercise, and social time along with caring for their young children. No matter what it is, these montages- which are meant to be motivating – can be harmful. They perpetuate a message that is inherently capitalistic: be productive, all the time, or else.
This season, I want to extend an invitation to you: please, join me in spirit as I seek rest. The purpose of this is not to rest as a means to be more productive at work, or parenting, or your routines. The purpose of resting is to simply rest, for no other reason than that it is your birthright and a crucial salve for your body and mind.
An invitation to rest may feel like an invite to an exclusive party, and one that you’re worried that you might not actually be invited to or maybe shouldn’t attend. This is how deeply ingrained the capitalistic, colonizing, patriarchal narrative of how life “should” look is. We think that rest is for other people, and we don’t deserve to demand it. You have permission to manage the internal dialogue – that is deeply ingrained from our capitalist culture, and not from necessity – that says we must be productive at all times.
Every person can benefit from incorporating rest. Rest should be up there with food, water, and shelter. Without rest, things like depression, anxiety, and PTSD are amplified, and life can begin to feel unmanageable. We are a culture that is deeply driven by productivity, but who is that productivity benefitting? Certainly not you.
What Doing Less Can Look Like
Simply having periods of the day, or even days, where you don’t have any plans or things that you have to do. It might be taking time to do something that you’d normally rush to do – making breakfast, taking a shower – but slowing down these activities that are really pleasurable to do, and giving them more time and space in our day.
By doing less – not having to go grocery shopping and go to the gym and do mindfulness work all in the same day – you might have time to have a long meal with yourself. You might have time to sit in the bath, and not feel like you have to do something while you do it. Doing less is literally doing less. And that includes doing inward work like guided meditation, shamanic journaling, psychedelic work! Sometimes, turning inwards doesn’t necessarily mean you’re doing less; you might feel obligated to do a lot of inward work as a form of rest, but it can feel like a lot. Turning inward can instead look like being with the stillness of the moment without doing anything.
Laziness is a Lie
One of the things I hear from my clients the most is that doing less somehow equals to or results in being lazy, and people are very afraid of being lazy. I wonder sometimes if this comes from the Judeo-Christian culture where sloth is a sin, and that not contributing in some way is seen as a negative thing in our culture. People have internalized that doing less is the same thing as being lazy, and there is a lot of shame and guilt around that. We need to really look at that internalized message about doing less and laziness.
There’s an incredible book called “Laziness Does Not Exist,” and this book really discusses how this notion of laziness is not really real. We feel like we have to do more, but the feeling of laziness is associated with an unreachable standard of hyperproductivity.
Challenging this internalized idea of laziness and this shame and guilt around doing less is an important aspect of decolonizing and challenging a cultural system that you are allowed to not agree with. Capitalism, patriarchy, white supremacy – when we challenge this whole notion of productivity and laziness, we start to come up against some of the key themes in those oppressive systems.
How to Give Yourself Permission to Rest
Bring awareness. Noticing. Shedding lights on the parts that are normally in the dark. Even just reading this invitation to rest from me, and realizing your beliefs may be tied to systems of oppression, then you might be able to interrupt these thoughts if you notice them, because you’re aware that it’s something you don’t really agree with, and that these things don’t really align with your core values.
Interrupting these patterns of thought is to simply see and acknowledge them in real-time in your own mind. And that really helps with any behavior that you want to get curious about. On that note – I don’t really like the notion of trying to get rid of parts of self, but I do think it’s healing to get curious about parts and better understand them so that we can work with them, instead of having them work against us in our subconscious.
The Benefits of Doing Less
Rest and relaxation affect the body, mind, and spirit in the ways that you would expect. The nervous system calms down; you might find that you’re clenching your jaw less or tightening your shoulders less, but these things may take time.
When you initially try to look at your own thoughts and ways of thinking and try to undo years of patterns, it can be uncomfortable to make those changes, so you might notice some discomfort with resting and relaxing – and that’s okay! It’s good to get curious about that too.
It's something new and different, so be gentle with yourself as you practice this. And you might find that your spirit has a new, deep sense of calm. You might feel less anxious, or less sad because you’re more present and you’re more grounded in the moment.
Nature as our Teacher
If you’ve ever walked onto a trail on a cold winter day, it’s very quiet. There are not that many animals, there’s not much growth happening. In the summer, you hear more going on. You hear birds, animals scurrying; in the winter, you don’t because there’s a stillness to nature. It knows to slow down and preserve its energy during this time. Nature, in the wintertime, does less. Things die, it’s not growing as much; things are stalled. The ground freezes, and everything kind of slows down pretty intensely, to the point of almost stillness.
It’s an important time, because in the spring and summer when we have more things to do and the days are longer, we want more energy. Our energy has to build within a balance of internal and external energy. The fall and winter are opportunities for us to slow down, turn inward, do less, and let the mind and the body relax a bit so that when it’s time to rev up a bit in spring and summer, we have the energy to meet the day. These are important cycles that balance us, and the earth teaches us how to do that.
Nature is the greatest teacher. If you feel like it’s hard to get grounded, it might be time to take your shoes off. Step on the ground. Feel what the rhythm of the earth wants to tell you about slowing down or speeding up. Nature speaks to us – but only if we are listening.
Warmly,
Dori