WTF is Life Altering Rest

What if you rest to connect with what makes you feel alive again? 

What if what makes you feel alive allows you to fully rest?

What if your excuses and triggers can be an activation of where you are subconsciously wanting to grow next to nourish your aliveness and the fullness of your life? 

What if working through sticky perspectives around worthiness and belonging can help you feel more settled as you rest and less likely to dissociate? 

After burning out more times than I’d like to admit, I’ve developed a practice of Life Altering Rest. At the time, I knew I wanted to have an unconventional, unprecedented life where I could spend most of my time focusing on what was meaningful for me. 

My family, my friends, my pets, and myself. 

At the same time, my beliefs on what life I “had” to live prevented me from honoring the parts of me that craved something different.

I was in a state of restlessness, dissociation, procrastination, and running from fire to fire. 

At my lowest, I have tried meditation, yoga, sleeping, scrolling, eating better, exercising, and everything WebMD told me may help me feel better. 

It wasn’t until I was recovering from COVID alone in my apartment after 2 weeks of straight crying from the stress and pressure of my life even though I technically was in bed “resting” but my environment and the structures I had in place to actually “rest” were as effective as a tissue paper umbrella in the middle of a hurricane. 

After speaking with hundreds of people about their experiences of burnout , it is clear to me that our notions of rest are more complex than just taking a nap, “treating yourself”, or making yourself a bubble bath.

I realized I lived an overstimulating live under the guise of “resting” through constant phone usage, taking on new things, throwing myself into relationships

But the truth is that I was running from a closer more honest relationship with myself. A relationship with myself where I gave myself the space to honor my values and the person I wanted to become. 

Deep deep down I understood I was:

• Reacting from a place of dis-empowerment because I saw myself as a trapped victim of circumstance instead of a leader with a powerful purpose
• Constantly fantasize about escaping through building a commune with friends, and living off the land instead of taking responsibility of my life, my choices and my ability to make change
• Overdoing it, over committing, over consuming, over functioning emotionally as a way to avoid the more fragile and intricate truths that make me me. 

The rest I was experiencing was surviving and not substantive enough for me to actually change my disposition. 

The notion of Life Altering Rest busted through these experiences like a diamond in a coalmine. 

Life Altering Rest is a dance with traditional definitions of what rest means because, let’s be honest, those traditional definitions aren’t enough to combat the dissociation, constant stimulation, and high levels of stress and fear that plague our society today. 

Your rest is the soil that you grow from and build from, it is what gives you nourishment as you move through the seasons and cycles of your life. 

Your ability to rest well is a dance between your expression, your nervous system, your environment, and the stories you tell yourself about who you are and who you are and are not becoming.

Allowing yourself to shift your relationship to self therefore shifting your relationship to your aliveness and rest means you don’t have to reach to your pain, how much you sacrificed, how hard you work to justify your pleasure. 

Since re-defining my definitions of rest to include the vegetables (self reflection/healing/rapid growth and transformations) AND the candy (adventure, creativity, naps) I have been able to actually build capacity for myself to go after the things I really want in life. I have enough mental and emotional space to take the side quests that make my world bigger and brighter, and I find myself unfolding into new layers of authenticity and growth for myself.

This practice was so personal and expansive for me so when I started to see my clients who wanted to do incredible things, but got stuck in their own heard, found themselves procrastinating, responding from a place of fear instead of rapid expansion, I created a 100+ page workbook designed to help translate everything I know about burnout and rest into a series of creative missions that are designed to help you connect with your next version of self. 

Don’t just take my word for all of this, snag my immersive workbook on Life Alternating Rest