Rest Yourself

Disconnect and reconnect.

R e s t .

Per my Aries rising astrological forecast via Chani Nicholas, I’m taking the beginning of the new year to reconsider what rest means to me and how I can center it in my daily life.

There’s been a surge in recent years promoting rest. Which is great. In the wake (and midst, let’s be honest) of hustle & grind culture, it’s imperative we wake up to the truth that we operate better when\ we actually rest in ways that actually support us. As I see it, rest requires disconnecting from what you were doing and connecting to something different that nourishes and replenishes you. 

For me, rest is writing and reading and yoga and walking. Rest happens in the pockets of time in which I am not bound to someone else’s expectations — or my own, mind-based, ‘you should’ expectations. In this freedom, I can more easily sense where my body and energy authentically want to go.

Awareness —> agency

When you have awareness of how you feel and what you need, you expand your agency. When you know you need to rest, you can start making that happen. We need rest every single day. We need softness every single day. Today, you can decide to rest in the ways you can rest today. 

On a more macro level, if something big consistently drains your life force and you want to be done with it, the path to rest becomes more involved. It can take months or a whole damn year to figure out how to restore balance within your system.

How do you know when you need to rest? You’re exhausted all day. You’re antsy or bored or irritated or scattered. You find yourself in endless cycles of stress and illness and spiraling.

When my mind needs rest, it usually means that my thoughts have been co-opted by the emotions, and problems of other people. In this fixated state, my thoughts are unhelpful and rarely true, so the point is to shift them. Change my location, go outside, get into my body, give myself an errand.

Yoga is a practice that connects me to myself. I started practicing mid 2016 at a studio called Akasha. I’d ride my bike 14 minutes from the dorms, through the arboretum, to the 9am or 4:30pm hot vinyasa. I didn't know what I was doing, I just started going every day. I didn’t have a job then, just college and yoga. The heat got me hooked: it pulled me entirely from my mind and into my body and reminded me that yes I do know who I am.

Rest is respecting where your energy wants to be.

Your body can recognize when something is done, or when you are done with something. Leave when you’re ready to leave. Be done when it is done. Take a temporary or permanent rest. Your body knows when to be soft, to be still, to hold on, to let go.

This involves a lot of de- and reconditioning because we have grown up in a world that says power through! Rest when you’re dead! Dominate your body! Force it to diet and stay awake and don’t let it feel bad or sad or mad!

Oh no. We are not here to dominate our bodies, we are here to live in them. Don’t let it get to a point where you wake up one day sick and sad, life in shambles, because your body has been trying to tell you to STOP AND REST for weeks / months / years and you have ignored it. Things don’t always get better.

Respect what your energy is telling you now. 

Rest yourself, fully.

Wishing abundant blessings to you in 2022.

xx maggie