I've been tired in a way that sleeping doesn't fix.

Not all the time. Not dramatically. Just a sort of low hum underneath everything. It’s the kind of tired that shows up after years of doing, building, showing up, and caring for others and the things that matter. I suspect I'm not the only one.

Mine has its specifics, as I am sure yours does, too. This is something I hear from a lot of the people I sit with both individually and in groups. Collectively, we’re all tired.

And then on Thursday, someone on our Thrive Community call said something I haven't stopped thinking about.

We were talking about pausing- about how much our bodies are asking for it, and how rarely we listen. About how if we don't choose our pauses, our bodies choose them for us. We get sick. We break down. We crash in a week we couldn't afford to crash. The rest happens, but it happens as an emergency, at usually the worst possible moment, on terms we didn't choose.

It's so much kinder when we choose it ourselves.

But here's the part I keep sitting with; most of us don't actually know how to choose it. We've been trained out of it. We live in a culture that treats rest as a reward you earn after the work is done and guess what? The work is never done. So even when we try to rest, we end up doing rest the way we do everything else. Optimizing it. Scheduling it. Making it productive. And almost always, alone.

I mentioned on the call that I've just started listening to the audio book Mysteries of the Dark Moon, and it turned out someone else on the call had been reading it, too. For me, it names something I've been trying to articulate for a while. Our ancestors rested when the moon was dark, for three days each month when there was no light, and no one pretended otherwise. The dark was the dark. You went inside. You let what was under the surface come to the surface.

But they didn't do it alone. Stories were told. Women gathered during their moon time to be together. There was awe and wonder, and also real fear and the question: Would the light come back? Nobody knew for certain. And so they sat in the dark together and told the stories that helped them wait.

We don't really have that anymore. And what I want to say carefully is this: I don't think the answer is that all of us now need to gather physically together to rest. The reality is that most of us don’t have a physical village of people who are willing or able to set aside three days for resting every twenty-eight days even if we wanted to do so. In reality, for some of us rest looks like five minutes alone in the car before walking back inside. For some of us, it looks like a whole day without talking to anyone while playing with art supplies. For others, it looks like a friend on the couch saying nothing or talking together about the things that really matter. The shape of the rest is yours to discover.

What I think we've actually lost isn't the gathering. It's the container. It’s the shared knowing that other people are also doing this. Other people are also pausing. Other people are also sitting with what's underneath. Other people are also figuring out what rest even means for them, in this life, right now.

Because here's the thing. In a culture that doesn't support rest, that actively punishes it in a thousand quiet ways, choosing to rest is a radical act. Choosing to listen to your body instead of overriding it is a radical act. Choosing to stop optimizing yourself and your every moment, even for an hour, is a radical act. And radical acts are hard to sustain alone. Not because you can't do them alone, because you can, and sometimes you have to. But because doing them without any sense that others are doing them too is exhausting in its own way.

That's part of what I'm trying to build for myself and for others. Not a prescription for how to rest, but rather a container for figuring it out together, even when the resting part happens alone.

I don't think rest is a technique. I think it's a relationship with your body, with your feelings, with the parts of yourself you usually try to outrun. And I think it's easier to be in that relationship when you know you're not the only one attempting it.

What I keep coming back to is that the relationship looks different for each of us, and different in different seasons. Right now, for some of you, rest might mean three days. For others, an hour of something genuinely nurturing. For others, it might mean one breath, and feeling your feet on the floor, and feeling your own body in this moment.

All of it counts. None of it is too small. And most importantly, none of it has to look like anyone else's.

Here's what I'm sitting with this week:

What would it mean to choose my pause before my body chooses it for me and to know that other people are choosing theirs, too?

I'd love to know what that question stirs for you. You can just hit reply.

Be curious. Be kind. Start with yourself.

With love,

Rebecca