Hello dear one,

This week, I noticed myself in a really old pattern, and I wanted to share it with you because I think you might recognize something similar in yourself.

A few days ago, I did the very thing I help others learn to do differently. I pushed myself past the point where I should have stopped, ironically working on a Radical Rest Retreat. I worked to exhaustion trying to finish, forgetting everything I know cognitively about rest and the nervous system, until I hit the place I couldn't keep going. I finally got the message, climbed into bed, and woke up the next morning wired, still exhausted and buzzing at the same time. My old pattern, exactly. (It actually mirrors the way I came into the world, but that's a story for another day.)

Maybe you have a similar pattern. It's the one where rest only comes after you've run yourself all the way down, and you literally can't keep going.

But this time, lying there, something was different. I noticed it. I saw the pattern while I was inside it, lying in bed staring at the ceiling, wondering how I'd ended up so exhausted again. And that noticing, it turns out, is everything, because it's the moment a pattern contains a choice point.

So I asked myself: what do I want to orient toward today? Not the old speed. I wanted to orient to the speed my nervous system actually needs to go to be in health. Slowing down. Being kind to my own body. Getting curious about what I actually need underneath all the doing.

I can't change every external pressure, or the things I'm stressed about that are happening in the world. They're real. But I can start with myself, right here, right now. And that morning, that's what I did.

As I've continued to reflect, I realize that choosing to rest before I've collapsed, to pause without earning it first, doesn't feel small. It feels almost defiant. Because it goes against everything I was trained to believe about what makes me worth something.

Which brings me to a word.

When we named this work Radical Rest, I realized that some people brace at "radical." We hear it as loud, as political, as extreme. And I'm not trying to soften it, because the word is more right than I knew.

"Radical" comes from the Latin radix, meaning root. So at its origin, radical means going all the way down to the root of a thing.

And that's the whole of my work, in one word. So much of what we're told stays at the surface. We're told to sleep more, but never asked why rest feels unsafe. We treat the anxiety, not the imprint underneath it. We manage the behavior, not the nervous system pattern driving it. We carry transgenerational wounds nobody ever named, and we're handed band-aids for problems whose roots go back generations.

The surface is where the band-aids live.

The root is where the truth lives.

Going to the root is a radical act. Not because it's loud, but because it refuses to stay on the surface where everything is more comfortable and nothing actually changes. Naming what's been unnamed. Looking directly at what we've been taught to look away from. That's radical.

And rest is one of the places it begins. Because the problem was never that we're just not sleeping enough (although many of us aren't). It's the root belief underneath: that rest has to be earned, that slowing down isn't safe, that your worth is measured in what you produce. We live inside systems that run on our exhaustion, that would rather we never stop long enough to ask the deeper question, or to notice we have a choice.

So choosing real rest, all the way down to the root, is a quiet rebellion. It might be the most radical thing you do all year.

This is the work I've been doing my whole life, since I first sat down in a therapist's office in my twenties. Always reaching for the root. Never the band-aid.

So here's something I made for you, to begin.

It's called the Radical Rest Kit. A small no-cost guide full of ideas for real rest in the time you actually have, five minutes or a whole weekend. It costs you nothing but a little willingness and time. And it's a good place to start finding your own radical edges, the places where you get to choose differently than the world has trained you to.

It's yours, free. I hope it meets you right where you are.

And if it stirs something inside you, there's more. This June, I'm hosting a live online retreat with my dear friend and podcast co-host, Meredith Alvarado. It's called the Radical Rest Retreat, June 19 to 21. Three days to rest, together, wherever you are. There's also a self-paced version you can move through on your own timing and return to whenever you need.

Interested in our live group retreat? https://thrivinghumans.newzenler.com/courses/radical-rest-retreat​

Ready to try the self-paced version now? https://thrivinghumans.newzenler.com/courses/radical-rest-retreat-self-directed​

But start with the Kit. Let it be enough for today. The rest will be here when you're ready.

Be curious. Be kind. Start with yourself.

With love,

Rebecca