You Have Time

Week Two of Summer of Rest

Hello dreamer!

Here we are in our second week of the Summer of Rest. What’s unfolded for you so far? Everything counts, and I invite you to take a moment to celebrate even the tiniest moments of rest.

For those of you who couldn’t be with us live for yesterday’s practice circle, the recording is now up in the Notion HQ, in the usual spot.

In last week’s essay, we explored the physicality of rest. The nervous system and how you can work from the bottom-up to cultivate a restful embodied state.

This week we’re going to explore rest from the perspective of the mind. Which means we’re going to get into all the sneaky cultural stories that we swim around in on a daily basis, the power of getting really discerning with your attention, and what you can do when you find yourself resistant to resting.

As with last week, there are a collection of experiments for you at the end of this essay. Think of them as a buffet for you to browse over, take as much or as little as you like. I’m sure you’ll get sick of me saying this (I know my 1:1 clients certainly do!) but – you can’t do this wrong. We’re here to find your way of resting. You get to choose what is right pace, right relationship for your practice.

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Moving so fast

I grew up in Perth, Western Australia. Perth is a city, a million plus people and a bustling CBD, but at its core it’s basically an oversized beach town. Even more so in the 80’s and 90’s when I was a kid. You’d wait half an hour for a bus. Shops were open half-days on Sundays. At my first proper 9-5 office job, people would head to the beach for extended lunch breaks if the surf was good.

You can imagine my wide-eyed surprise when I first landed in London at age 19. Living and working in the middle of Soho, navigating the tumultuous thrum of Oxford Street crowds, wowed by the immediacy of the crowded, incessant tube. It took a minute but soon enough this relentless pace of living slipped beneath my skin and moving at a million miles an hour became as normal as breathing.

I remember going home for Christmas one year. Charging through the tinselled shopping district, my bemused mum remarking on my new “London walk” as she trailed on my heels. As I aggressively dodged and weaved through the crowd, cussing under my breath at the meandering shoppers, the busyness rang through me like a bell. My London pace felt powerful. I was getting shit done. I was fast-paced and highly productive and a little bit superior to all these chilled out fools.

Ahh the joys of being in your 20’s and knowing everything.

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The water we’re swimming in

Of course, you don’t have to be living in a big city or be an elder millennial to notice that the pace of life is frantically fast.

We’re swimming in the waters of late stage, neoliberal capitalism, with a side of rationalism, and colonialism. And with that comes the cultural conditioning kool aid of immediacy, convenience, individualism, and extraction as the norm. We’re raised to believe that work is the centre of life. That our worth is linked to how much we get done in a day. That we are separate, disconnected from one another and the Earth. And that our time, energy, and labour is grist for the mill.

Even our attention can be mined to line someone’s pockets. We carry these tiny personal computers in our pockets, which connect us to a deluge of stimulation, news, and communication way beyond what our minds have evolved to take in.

And even if you push against the system - as I imagine many of you do - it can be hard to escape the habitual mental busyness. Instead of grinding to make it to the C-Suite we devote all our energy to our small businesses, activism, or even healing and personal growth, which somehow makes our actions feel even more urgent and our rest even more guilt-ridden.

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The cost of fast

There are side effects to all that speed and mental noise.

It’s not unusual to live with a constant undercurrent of anxiety. A persistent worry that we’re not getting enough done, we’re running out of time, we’re lazy. Our minds can feel like decidedly un-restful places to be. Over-stimulated and over-saturated like a sodden sponge sitting squishily in our heads. All it takes is one prod to release a chaotic mix of half-thought thoughts, memes, other people’s opinions, unprocessed emotions, and the chorus of a Chappell Roan song that you didn’t know you knew.

It’s the mental equivalent of permanently inhaling. Filling up and up and up but never releasing.

We need space to exhale, digest, process, because all that rush and the clamour pulls us away from ourselves. Out of presence. With no space to pause, we move on auto-pilot. Reacting and reactionary. Mindlessly rushing into and playing out the same patterns we’ve always done.

In my experience it’s much easier to attune to our wise self, our intuition, when we have space to hear our own thoughts. And it’s much easier to make choices that feel aligned with our values when we’re not running on auto-pilot.

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Interrogating urgency

Good news is that - hey - you have agency! You get to choose how you spend your energy, your attention, your time. And you get to find a pace of life that actually allows you to thrive rather than just tear frantically from one thing to another.

All it requires is a little curiosity. To start to notice what urgency feels like in your system. To catch the tell tale signs when they creep in.

One of my teachers impressed a mantra upon me years ago - ‘Release the force’. It’s a phrase that carried me through my own interrogations of internalised capitalism. And now I offer it to you.

On a physical level, it reminds you that you don’t have to push through tiredness. That you’re a cyclical, spiralling animal not a machine. On a mental level, it breathes space into the hurriedness of daily life, and helps you trust that there’s time for things to unfold at their own pace. Emotionally, it is a gentle nudge to notice when you’re twisting internalised stories about productivity and worth against yourself. A call to come back to tending your fire and filling your cup (pick whichever analogy fits you better).

To release the force is to wonder what you would do differently if you were just pleasing yourself. Down beneath the waves of the shoulds and the external timelines. It’s a call to drop back from the breathless rush of scarcity - never enough! always more to do before you get to rest! - and into a sense of abundance.

What if you have all the time in the world?

What if things will unfold without you having to make them unfold through willpower and energy expenditure alone?

What would you do differently if you thought you had time?

And of course we still exist in the world. We can interrogate our internalised urgency and still have work deadlines and kids school uniforms and tax returns that require attention. As much as I would love for us all to be able to live a life where we all get to move at our own pace all the time, sometimes it’s just not possible. But that doesn’t stop us from getting to cultivate more of that spaciousness for ourselves.

We can plant the seeds of right pace in the places that we can control - our own lives. We can see what it feels like to resist the cultural urgency we swim in daily. To answer that email tomorrow, to prioritise something pleasurable over another hour at your desk, to rejig your day so that you’re not spending all of your precious resources on things that drain you. This is both/and kind of work.

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Easing in to slowness

Which brings us to the somatic concept of titration.

Titration is a word poached from chemistry - the act of adding something into a solution drop by drop. In somatics we use it to describe taking tiny doable steps. Enabling our systems to process, integrate and digest to new ways of being without overwhelming ourselves with too much too fast.

Because if you’re running at a baseline of busyness and overstimulation it can feel hugely challenging to suddenly slow down. Have you ever gone on a holiday and spent the whole holiday anxiously trying to unwind? That. Our nervous system isn't actually that into huge dramatic change. In fact, it can be super dysregulating.

So instead of all or nothing, we take tiny doable steps. Little moments of unlearning urgency and practicing rest. It's actually way more efficient, sustainable and long-lasting to take small, doable steps in harmony with our natural instincts. We find the right pace, right size for our rest. And we allow ourselves to take breaks and pauses when necessary.

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A short word on resistance.

When resistance pops up it can be so easy to chastise ourselves. Often we can find ourselves resistant to something that we logically know we want (rest, for example). And our minds, being wired for story and pattern recognition, get to work weaving a tale about why we’re resistant - that we don’t want it enough, that we suck at resting, that we’re bad at looking after ourselves.

None of which are based in fact.

What’s more likely to be true is that your resistance is a call for safety.

If and when you bump up against resistance in your explorations of rest this month, try not to be a dick to yourself. There’s no value judgement needed. Resistance is just your system saying that resting feels big and scary and different to what you know.

It makes total sense that it feels challenging. For a million reasons. That’s why we’re practice taking tiny doable steps. You’re finding out what right size and right relationship to rest is for you right now. You’re building your capacity for resting, bit by bit.

And if you’re not doing it, I suggest making the step even tinier. A two minute pause. Three slow breaths. Bigger isn’t better here. The best rest practice is the one you actually do.

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Possible experiments

1. Making space

   This is an invitation to carve out mental space by getting really discerning about what you’re consuming.
   

   I first did this exercise as part of The Artist’s Way, that 90’s classic on creative process by Julia Cameron. She prescribes a week of media deprivation as a way of consciously unplugging. No books, no newspapers, no TV. Obviously it was written before the advent of smart phones, so I also include no social media and mindless internet scrolling when I do it.
   

   Julia challenges readers to a full week with no media, which is an intense, if eye-opening, experiment. If that feels exciting to you, go for it! For our purposes though, smaller forays into making space work just as well. Start by paying attention to the media you consume, and notice if any of it doesn’t feel restful to your system. Use that info to shape your parameters.
   

   You could block socials for the morning, leave your phone at home for the day, forgo the siren song of the after dinner Netflix binge. You choose how much and how long. You choose what you do with the space you create.

2. Building a container for rest

   I’m all about creating supportive structure around your rest. This counts double if you’re neurodivergent or have reduced energetic capacity.

   
   It means you’re not just sneaking rest in as a bandaid in between Things To Do, but also your mind can more easily relax knowing that this time is intentionally carved out for you to rest. There is nothing else to do.
   

   How could you plan rest into your days? What do you need to do to make it easy to rest?

   
   Maybe it’s scheduling space for rest into your calendar, or setting an alarm to remind you to pause in your work day. Maybe you block off a day every fortnight with no plans other than to do whatever fills your cup. Maybe it’s building a morning practice of yoga nidra or a before bed ritual of brain dumping all your thoughts into a journal so you can sleep with a quieter mind.

   
   Give yourself the support you need to rest.

3. Interrogating busyness

   A couple of journaling prompts to help you unearth the threads of chronic busy:

   Where are you moving too fast for comfort?

   What does chronic busyness feel like to you?

   Does busyness make you feel safe in any way?

   Where is it no longer serving?

   When are you allowed to rest?

   What pace feels good to you?

   Where could you do less?

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Alright, my love! That’s this week’s musings. I would love to hear your thoughts, what sparks your interest, and how your experiments go through the week. Drop it in the comments!

See you Sunday for our next practice circle xx