🔼: [[⭐️ Needs]], [[⭐️ Self-Care]], [[⭐️ Self-Maintenance]], [[🛠 Pendulation Toolkit]] #### ⭐️ Rest and Restoration While not identical, the two are not fully distinct. They’re intrinsically tied and often overlap. Rest can be restorative; restoration can be restful. ##### Rest To rest is to set aside anything that depletes our energy. It looks the same for just about everyone, but some of us can be so constantly active that we don’t recognize all the ways we’re expending our energy. Rest isn’t just sleep, it’s giving ourselves permission to pause effort. To not force an answer. To not rush to fix, solve, change, or to become something other than what you are right now. It’s setting everything down, not engaging in any physical, mental, or emotional productivity. It can look like letting go of the belief that you should have an answer. Or giving yourself kindness instead of frustration or urgency for not having one, or for feeling lost. It’s allowing yourself to stop and be as you are right now, without trying to change. Maybe it’s about finding places where your nervous system can settle—even for a moment—so that exhaustion doesn’t consume you entirely. It’s not whether we’ve done enough to deserve rest, but whether we’re rested enough to fully show up in our lives. Relax, turn away work, stress, and personal projects for a time — even if they’re enjoyable. Often. Not for the sake of productivity, improvement, or anything other than rest for the sake of itself. Its opposite might be urgency, rushing, forcing, or “powering through,” which can happen in several facets of our lives in a myriad of ways, even in our relationships, even in conflict. We overwhelm ourselves when we don’t let ourselves rest. Noticing we’re rushing can be the first step of rest. Not stopping entirely, but realizing we could. - Let one thing not be urgent today. Even a small thing. - Imagine what it would be like if you had permission to do nothing for a moment. How does that feel? - [[🧘 Samatha Meditation]]: rest your attention on one or multiple simultaneous [[💡 Meditation Anchor|meditation anchors]] (sensations in the hands, pressure on our seat, a neutral or pleasant to look at object in the room, a sound or soft music, the flow of the breath). For the duration of the practice, our anchor(s) is the only thing in the world worth giving attention to. When we notice we’re distracted or wrapped up in thought, be glad for the noticing and return attention to the anchor(s). The longer we do this, the more the mind will come to rest. We could also read a book. The words on the page are our anchor — otherwise, same idea. Focusing on language can be less restful than paying attention to some other physical sense, though sometimes when my mind is particularly busy a book is a middle-point between lots of thought and none, like stepping down the rungs of a ladder. - [[🧘 See, Hear, Feel Rest]] - [[🧘 Yoga Nidra]] - [[🕯️ Doing Nothing]] - [[🧘 Yoga Nidra]] - [[🧘 See, Hear, Feel Rest]] - Deep Rest on [[📱 Waking Up]] - [[⭐️ Sleep]] (who'da thunk it?) Sometimes these physical practices, which expend more energy, end up giving me much more rest than I expect. - [[🕯️ Tension & Trauma Release Exercises (TRE)]] - [[🛠 Wavy Wiggles]] - Shaking in the [[🛠 Constructive Rest Position]] - [[🛠 Progressive Muscle Relaxation]] ###### Keys to Rest - Rest before you’re tired - [[🔑 Rest does not have to be earned]] - [[🔑 Rest is a crucial part of Learning]] - [[🔑 Muscle is built during rest]] - [[🔑 Laziness does not exist]] - [[🔑 We need Nothing]] - [[🔑 We aren’t supposed to feel our feelings all the time]] - [[🔑 Try not to make decisions or problem-solve from a place of fear]] - It’s okay to miss something. We can rest. ##### Restoration To Rest is to stop pouring from our cup. To Restore is to fill it, to drink of what replenishes, re-energizes, and revitalize us, makes us feel alive, nurtured, and refreshed. Emotional, spiritual, physical, relational nourishment. This varies person-to-person. - Kindness toward yourself: Speaking to yourself like you would a close friend. If that feels too hard, even just not being cruel to yourself is a start. - Finding places of settling: Sensory experiences that help your body feel a little safer—being outside, wrapping yourself in something warm, listening to sounds that soothe you. - Connecting with what fills you up, rather than drains you: Stories, ideas, movement, solitude, art, beauty—things that remind you of who you are, beyond exhaustion - Notice what leaves you feeling more like yourself. Even if just a little. - Pay attention to where your body naturally settles—a certain place, a sound, a texture, a rhythm. %% - Instead of looking for what feels good, look for what feels true. Sometimes they overlap. [[🔑 Pleasure is not happiness]] Pleasure is not nourishment. Pleasure is not [[⭐️ Self-Care]]. Tasting good is not being good for you. So can we cook with spices? Can we make something fun? Or beautiful? - Watching TV might feel good, but does it restore you? - Sex with a stranger might feel good, but does it nourish you? - A song might sound good (pleasurable), but is it good for you? - A medicine might taste bad, but cure our illness. - Lying under a tree, staring at the sky, might not be exciting, but does it bring a quiet kind of homecoming? %% Some questions to ask: - What leaves me feeling more like myself? - What makes me feel softer, more open? - What lets me breathe deeper? - What makes me feel nourished rather than just entertained, stimulated, or pleased? What feels restorative to one person might feel effortful or vexing to another – [[🔑 Trust your experience and intuition]]. - Fun / [[💡 Play|Play]] - [[⭐️ Community]] and [[⭐️ Relationships]] - [[⭐️ Cooking]] and [[Household Cleaning|Cleaning]] - [[🕯️ Resourcing]] - Cleaning, "refreshing the space" ###### Keys - Fill your cup before it’s empty. - A caterpillar has to dissolve themself into goo to become a butterfly. So even if we're wrapped up in blankets on the couch, we're still growing. - [[🔑 Progress accumulates]] - [[🔑 Listen to your body]] - [[🔑 We build capacity by respecting our limits]] ##### Going Deeper Rest and Restoration are not earned, they are [[⭐️ Needs]] directly tied to our capacities and inner resources. It’s not just tiring, but depleting to spend every waking moment expending effort on our [[🛠️ Goals and Intentions]]. Without these we can take on too much, too soon, for too long, and like an overworked muscle we can deplete to the point of [[💡 Burnout|Burnout]] or injury. --- R&R and action are two sides of a coin. Rather than seeing rest as a facet of productivity, or productivity as a way of earning rest, consider both to be in service of something else. When a musician strings a guitar, each string is dialed into the ideal balance of tension and relaxation. It's this balance that lets the instrument sing its song. R&R and Action allow us to sing ours. Further still, it is the silence between notes that gives a song its form. --- The constant barrage of knowledge, information, news, activity, general sensation, can easily separate me from myself in a slow, barely-noticeable kind of way if I’m not careful. It becomes easy to mistakenly [[💡 Blending|identify with thought]], or even with thoughts that don’t belong to me. --- If resting is unbearable, doing a ‘nothing activity‘ like chores can be helpful. Anything that breaks the flow of novel stimulation — from the internet, phones, media. So long as we aren’t in [[💡 Burnout|Burnout]], simply doing something less stimulating can be restful. It can be helpful to stop expecting rest to feel good at first. In [[the Modern World]], which is largely driven by capitalism, productivity, and self-improvement, actually resting without any intention to do anything ‘constructive‘ with it is bound to be a real challenge for some [[💡 Parts|parts of us]] to tolerate, never mind actually enjoy. This discomfort is a sign that they need the rest, and likely a sign of [[🪨 Internalized Capitalism]]. --- %% “Work hard, play hard,” has real wisdom in it. The harder we work, the harder we need to rest and restore ourselves to avoid [[💡 Burnout|Burnout]]. [[⭐️ Sleep]] is the bedrock of well-being, and considering sleep is a version of rest, it’s difficult to overstate how important rest and restoration is. %% ###### Related - [[🕯️ Re-Centering]] - [[💡 Burnout|Burnout]] - [[🕯️ Titration]] - [[⭐️ Life Curation]] - [Slow down, it's what your brain has been begging for](https://psyche.co/ideas/slow-down-its-what-your-brain-has-been-begging-for) - [[📖 🟡 Rest is Resistance]] - https://thenapministry.wordpress.com/about/ [^1]: