Accessing Rest and Aliveness

You deserve to access aliveness, just as much as you deserve to access rest. 

So today we are going to talk about developing the foundation for rest, rituals to keep you feeling alive, and how I chonk this practice up for myself and the people who work with me.

I am going to say it if no one else does: it can be incredibly challenging to actually feel rested in today’s world is because we have more demanding our attention than ever, our society has piled a bunch of bullshit beliefs onto our plates like you have to “work hard to play hard” and even if you do work through all of that to take a nap, you still may feel just as emotionally, spiritually, and physically exhausted as you did before. 

Systemic oppression is an amplifier to all of the above systems that make rest hard (this is a think piece in itself and if you want me to speak on this as I relaunch/ and remake my podcast let me know.)

Big breath in, big breath out, sip some water. 

If you aren’t familiar with my experiences and theories on rest, I believe that our ability to rest well is our ability to feel alive and all of the aforementioned systems dull our human experience. This makes it more difficult to feel anything. Which includes both sides of the scale. Rest and Aliveness.

After speaking with hundreds of people about their experiences of burnout I can easily say your ability to rest is a reflection of your ability to feel nourished and alive in all areas of your life and vice versa.

This re-frame has a ripple effect of incredibly powerful change:

• This means you can integrate pleasure in your life as a never ending expansive and liberating practice. 
• This means that your life becomes an opportunity to co-create magic with yourself and the tasks you do each and every day so you can create systems, rituals, and supports that more deeply honor your needs. 

A need for rest is an absence of the things you need to feel alive and so when we create Life Alternating Rest, we instead look at the systems of things that allow you to feel alive and how you are interacting with the systems of attention, labor, capacity, and oppression.

My work focuses on helping people create systems of alive-ness and liberation and freedom in a world where that can be dampened. I’ve created a 100+ page life changing book because navigating these dynamics is where my clients have consistently struggled the most… so I turned it into a game of challenges you can do daily, weekly, or beyond to support you in developing new systems so, collectively we can shift our culture. 

I’ve boiled the feeling of aliveness down to these three phases

Phase one Nourishment: the connection to and between your body mind and spirit

Phase two Connection: the intimacy and relationship between yourself and the world around you

Phase three Creation: culminating connections into artifacts, experiences, and other forms of expression

With every aspiration, and desire we have there is a shadow. There is a reason why that aspiration is a challenge or struggle within ourselves. This leads us to procrastination, dimming our own light, talking ourselves out of our visions for happiness, success, and more. There is a voice telling you that what you want will simply not work. The three big ones we will focus on throughout this book are 

Shame: feeling not good enough, not worthy of, closed off, hidden, and protective of your creative spirit and needs

Fear: expecting failure, the worst case scenario, considering what would be lost over what would be gained

Ego: looking silly, not being perfect, afraid of being wrong

So grab your curiosity, your playfulness, you willingness to be uncomfortable, your bravery, your vulnerability, and your truth and snag the full book!