Somewhere along the way, rest became something we earn. We work all week and then we get to rest on the weekend. We finish the project and then we can rest. We clean the house, answer the emails, take care of everyone else, cross everything off the list, make enough money, accomplish enough things—and then maybe we are allowed to sit the fuck down.
And even then, we have turned rest into another thing to accomplish. Take the bath. Book the massage. Get the pedicure. Buy the fancy candle. Have a self-care Sunday. Reset yourself so you can wake up Monday morning and get right back to producing.
And listen, I love a bath. I love a candle. I am certainly not here to take anybody's spa day away.
But I don't think that's rest. Or at least, I don't think that's the whole of it.
Rest isn't a reset button.
A reset button is something you push on a machine so that it will start functioning properly again.
And I am not a machine. Neither are you.
What If Rest Is a Way of Living?
The more I explore rest, the less interested I become in treating it as something I do and the more interested I become in understanding it as a way I am.
Rest might look like a slow morning where I wash my face, make my coffee, sit outside and journal for an hour before I decide the rest of the world gets access to me. It might be an afternoon tea ceremony where, for a little while, there is nowhere else I am supposed to be.
It might be a bath. It might be Netflix and chill. It might be staying in bed all damn day. It might be gardening. Walking. Meditation. Yoga. A bowl of warm soup. Turning the overhead lights off and filling the room with soft lamps and candles instead. Sitting on the porch wrapped in the coziest sweater I found at Goodwill with a fifty-cent bag of tea while the fall leaves blow around the yard.
Honestly, that last one can feel like a five-star vacation when you're not constantly being asked to survive your life.
And sometimes rest doesn't look particularly cozy at all. Sometimes rest is a boundary. Sometimes rest is saying no. Sometimes rest is realizing that you don't actually want to go somewhere, talk to someone, answer something, fix something, or make yourself available simply because someone else would prefer that you did.
Sometimes rest is listening when your body says stop.
And maybe the most radical part is believing that you don't have to earn the right to listen.
We Are Really Fucking Weird About Rest
We live in a culture that is remarkably impressed by exhaustion. People brag about how little they sleep. We admire people who never take a day off. We praise employees for coming in sick. We talk about grinding, hustling, pushing through, getting ahead.
I'll sleep when I'm dead.
What an absolutely bizarre thing to aspire to.
Because when exactly are we supposed to live?
I keep wondering what happens to a human being who spends decades overriding the body's requests.
I'm tired. Keep going.
I'm overwhelmed. Keep going.
I'm hungry. Not yet.
I need quiet. Answer the phone.
I don't want to do this. Do it anyway.
I need help. Everyone is counting on you.
I need to stop. You haven't earned that yet.
Do that for long enough and I wonder if eventually we stop hearing ourselves altogether.
And that, to me, is where rest becomes about something much larger than sleep.
Rest creates space. And space gives us an opportunity to hear ourselves again.
The Sacred Pause
What happens when there is actually a little space between something happening and your response to it?
What happens when you have enough internal quiet to ask:
Do I actually believe this? Do I actually want this? Why am I saying yes? Why am I so angry? Is this mine? Am I doing this because it feels true—or because everybody around me is doing it? What does my body have to say about any of this?
I wonder sometimes how much of what we call modern life is simply reaction. React to the notification. React to the headline. React to the person who pissed you off. React to the group chat. React to the algorithm. React to the boss. React to the bill. React to whatever everyone around you is afraid of today.
Where, in all of that, is the pause?
Because I think there is tremendous power in that pause. Not because rested people magically become enlightened or never do shitty things. Of course they do. But because spaciousness gives us the opportunity to choose.
And I cannot help wondering what would happen to us collectively if more human beings had enough internal spaciousness to contemplate their own behavior.
What might we refuse to participate in? What might we finally question? What might we notice? Who might we stop following? Who might we stop hurting? What might we finally have the courage to say no to?
Maybe rest is more radical than we've been led to believe.
And Then There's This Whole Business of Who Gets to Decide
Here's something I learned while thinking about this piece that genuinely surprised me.
I thought the United States had maternity leave.
I genuinely thought there was some sort of universal six-weeks-after-a-vaginal-birth, eight-weeks-after-a-C-section situation happening over here.
Apparently...no.
And before y'all come at me with, “Well, actually, we have FMLA, and women get six weeks after having a baby—or eight weeks if they have a C-section...”
Yeah. About that.
The whole six-to-eight-week thing is not some universal federally protected maternity-leave guarantee. And FMLA isn't universal either. You have to qualify for it, and your employer has to be covered by it. Even when you do qualify for federal FMLA, your employer is not federally required to pay you while you're home.
So, congratulations! You grew an entire human being. You birthed said human being. Your body now needs to recover while you simultaneously attempt to keep said tiny human being alive.
And in the United States, there is no universal federal guarantee that every working mother gets a protected period away from her job to do that—paid or unpaid.
What a completely normal and not-at-all-bizarre way to organize a society.
And this is exactly why I am so passionate about finding ways to remove ourselves, wherever we can, from systems that require us to surrender authority over our own bodies. Because if we wait for the system to tell us when we have worked enough, produced enough, earned enough, or suffered enough to finally deserve rest, we may be waiting forever.
We cannot wait for someone else to give us permission to rest.
At some point, we have to reclaim that permission for ourselves.
And I know that is not equally easy for everyone. Sometimes your paycheck, your children, your housing, your health insurance, and your basic survival are tangled up in the very systems you're trying to create some freedom from.
I'm not suggesting we all burn our lives to the ground tomorrow and go live barefoot in the woods.
Although, admittedly, don't threaten me with a good time.
I'm saying we can begin noticing where we've handed over authority. Who decides when you are tired enough to stop? Who decides whether you've accomplished enough to sit the fuck down? Who decided that your body needs to justify its need for rest in the first place?
Because maybe reclaiming rest doesn't begin with getting more vacation days.
Maybe it begins with remembering that your body was never your employer's property to begin with.
Giving More of Our Bodies
I've been thinking about this in relationship to work, too. We are so accustomed to the arrangement that sometimes I don't think we notice how strange it is.
You work a job. There is a ceiling on what you can make. Want more money? Give them more.
More responsibility. More availability. More hours. More stress. Become the supervisor. Then the assistant manager. Then the manager. Take the calls. Cover the shifts. Bring the laptop home.
Keep climbing.
At each level, you can receive a little more in exchange for giving more of your body—your time, your energy, your attention, your availability. Pieces of your actual life.
And I'm increasingly interested in asking whether abundance has to look like that.
Because when I say I want an abundant life, I don't only mean money. I want an abundance of mornings. An abundance of health. An abundance of laughter. An abundance of time with the people I love. An abundance of tea. An abundance of sunsets I actually noticed. An abundance of connection with God.
An abundance of days where I don't need a vacation from my own fucking life.
That counts too.
Actually, to me, that counts for quite a lot.
Our Bodies Are Not Static
And this becomes especially important when I think about women.
Our bodies change. Our needs change. Across the menstrual cycle. Through pregnancy. Postpartum. Perimenopause. Menopause. Aging. Grief. Stress. Seasons of enormous creativity and seasons when the body seems to be saying, Girl, absolutely fucking not.
And yet we're so often expected to perform as though every day should be identical to the one before it.
Same alarm. Same productivity. Same energy. Same output. Same expectations.
Why?
I don't believe my body owes me identical performance every day.
I am much more interested in learning its language. Maybe today it wants movement. Maybe tomorrow it wants stillness. Maybe today I wake with the sun. Maybe tomorrow I sleep until ten.
I am not particularly interested in performing spirituality at 4:00 in the morning just because somebody on the internet decided enlightened people wake up before everybody else.
If 4:00 a.m. feels sacred to you, beautiful. If 10:00 a.m. feels sacred to you, also beautiful.
Go outside when you wake up. Feel the sun. Touch the earth. Begin again.
I wonder what rhythms we might naturally return to if we stopped forcing ourselves into the ones we've inherited.
Tea Taught Me Something About This
One of the places I keep finding rest is tea.
My growing relationship with Cha Dao has been teaching me something I don't think I could have learned by simply reading the words slow down. Because tea asks me to be there.
Water. Leaves. Steam. A bowl. My hands. This moment.
That's it.
The teachings I've encountered through Global Tea Hut speak beautifully about tea and meditation as ways of creating space where there is nowhere to rush toward and nothing else that needs to be done.
And I love that.
But you also don't need a formal tea practice. Make the fifty-cent tea. Sit on the porch.
Let the tea breathe in the pause.
See what happens.
And Then There Is Yoga Nidra
Yoga Nidra has become one of the most powerful practices of rest in my own life and work.
One of the teachers who has profoundly shaped the way I understand this is Tracee Stanley, particularly through her teachings around Radiant Rest. Her work approaches Yoga Nidra not merely as another technique to perform, but as a doorway into deep rest, self-inquiry, and remembering something more fundamental about who we are. Tracee Stanley — Radiant Rest
Yoga Nidra is sometimes translated as “yogic sleep,” but I don't experience it as simply going to sleep. It is a practice of allowing. Of lying down. Of withdrawing, little by little, from all the things demanding your attention. Of hovering in those strange, spacious places between waking and sleeping.
Of doing less.
And eventually, perhaps, discovering what remains when you stop trying so damn hard to be something.
Rest and Sovereignty
This is also one of the reasons I've resonated with conversations around sovereignty, including some of the work of Alec Zeck and The Way Forward. I am deeply interested in the question of what happens when human beings stop waiting for institutions, systems, and authorities to tell them how to inhabit their own lives.
Because I think rest has something to do with sovereignty.
A person who never has a moment to think doesn't have much opportunity to examine what they believe. A person who never stops moving doesn't have much opportunity to ask where they're going. A person who is constantly overwhelmed doesn't have much room to hear the quiet voice underneath all the noise.
And maybe that's why I increasingly think rest is radical.
Not because rest makes us immune to manipulation. Not because sitting on the porch with a cup of tea is going to dismantle every broken system.
But because it creates a little room in which we can remember:
I can think. I can feel. I can question. I can choose. I can say no. I belong to myself.
And Maybe This Is Where God Is, Too
For me, this eventually becomes spiritual.
Because I think rest is one of the ways we connect with God.
Not necessarily through another person's rules. Not necessarily inside an institution. Not necessarily because someone has told us what God is supposed to sound like.
But in the stillness between thoughts. The space between breaths. The moment after the tea is poured. The silence after the crying stops. The garden. The bath. The meditation cushion. The yoga mat. The hammock.
The moment you finally stop trying to accomplish something and simply are.
I think there is something there.
Call it God. Call it consciousness. Call it your soul. Call it intuition. Call it nature. Call it absolutely nothing if that's what works for you.
I'm not here to tell you what you're supposed to find.
I'm only telling you that I've begun to wonder whether we spend so much of our lives surrounded by noise that we can't hear whatever has been there underneath it all along.
And grief knows this.
Grief comes crashing into our lives and suddenly everything stops. The meetings don't matter. The emails don't matter. The laundry can fucking wait.
Someone died.
And suddenly we remember that there are things bigger than productivity.
Why should death be one of the only things powerful enough to give us permission to stop?
I Don't Want to Wait Until I'm Dead to Rest
So no, I don't have a ten-step morning routine for you. I don't have the perfect amount of sleep to prescribe. I'm not going to tell you to wake up at 4:00 a.m., meditate for an hour, drink some magical potion, journal five pages, and become the optimized version of yourself.
Actually, I am increasingly uninterested in optimizing myself at all.
I want to inhabit myself.
I want to know when I'm tired. I want to know when I'm full. I want to recognize when something feels wrong. I want enough quiet to hear my own thoughts. I want enough space to change my mind. I want enough sovereignty to say no. I want enough softness to say yes.
I want to make tea. I want to sit in the sun. I want to sleep when I need sleep. I want to work when there is something meaningful asking to be brought into the world. I want to love people well. I want to notice my life while I'm still living it.
And I want to stop treating rest like the tiny consolation prize waiting for me after I've given everything else away.
Maybe I'm onto something.
Maybe I'm completely full of horseshit.
You don't have to believe me. In fact, I'd rather you didn't believe me simply because I said it.
Go find somewhere quiet. Turn off the fucking phone. Make the tea. Take ten slow breaths. Put your feet in the grass. Say no to something you don't want to do. Stay in bed if that's what your body is begging for. Leave a little space in the day where nobody gets anything from you.
And listen.
See what you find there.
Because I am beginning to believe that rest is not something we earn after we've done enough. It isn't a reward for surviving our lives. It isn't a reset button that prepares us to become productive again.
Rest is part of being alive.
And maybe—just maybe—
Rest is our divine right.
If You'd Like Somewhere to Begin...
None of this needs to become another thing on your to-do list. Please don't turn resting into something else you have to be good at.
But if you're craving a little more space and aren't quite sure what that could look like, here are a few places to experiment:
Take ten intentional breaths. That's it. No app. No special technique. Stop for ten breaths and be wherever you are.
Make tea and let tea be the only thing you're doing. It can be ceremonial tea or a fifty-cent tea bag from the grocery store. Put the phone down. Hold the cup. Drink the tea.
Turn down the lights. Especially as evening comes, turn off the glaring overhead lights. Light a candle. Turn on a soft lamp. Let the space around you become quieter too.
Go outside without making it productive. You don't have to get your steps. You don't have to hike three miles. Sit in the sun. Put your feet in the grass. Watch the trees. Be outside.
Give yourself an hour that has no assigned purpose. Don't schedule what you're going to do during your “rest hour.” Leave it empty and see what you actually want when you get there.
Find a way to hear yourself. Journal if you love journaling. Talk into your phone. Make a private video diary. Sit quietly. Pray. You don't have to process yourself in the way somebody else told you to.
Try Yoga Nidra. Get ridiculously comfortable. Pillows, blankets, eye covering—the whole thing. Lie down, allow yourself to be guided, and practice doing absolutely nothing.
Have a deliberately cozy day. Stay in bed. Make soup. Wear the soft clothes. Watch the movie. Snuggle somebody you love. Read the book. Let nourishment be enough of an accomplishment for the day.
Say no to one thing you don't actually want to do. Sometimes creating rest isn't about adding another ritual. Sometimes it's about removing the thing that was stealing the space in the first place.
Give yourself a retreat. Maybe that's three hours with your phone turned off. Maybe it's a whole day alone. Maybe it's a weekend in the woods. Maybe it's the ridiculously luxurious spa vacation you've always wanted. Rest doesn't have to cost money—but you're also allowed to let it be extravagant when you want it to be.
These aren't rules. They're invitations. Take what feels restful. Leave what doesn't.
