Cultivate Rest in Winter
In the midst of winter, things tend to get H-E-A-V-Y. If you live in the Northern Hemisphere you may be in it right now! And it feels as if we barely have a moment to breathe before the news cycle present some fresh hell. I don't need to tell you.
So let's focus on winter for the moment. Winter is a time for us to go inward, to slow down, to be quiet. It is a time for us to gather our fuel for the high energy that spring and summer bring.
The culture we are in in the West, specifically that of white supremacist heteropatriarchy, does not want us rested. This system that we're a part of wants us working, it wants us producing and churning out work. It wants us tethered to a computer 15 hours a day and it wants us to grind. It wants urgency and has us feeling guilty when we're not making shit happen. I think for many of us it will be a life-long practice to shed this conditioning. To access permission to allow ourselves rest.
When I was in recovery from my liver transplant I felt extreme pressure to go back to work. Some of that pressure was external, some of it came from a broken healthcare system in the US (I feared I would lose my excellent healthcare if I didn't, which I desperately needed) and a lot of it came from within. I returned to a high-octane work environment at The Tonight Show far before I was ready, in the middle of winter with a compromised immune system. By mid-March after 7 weeks back at my 10-7 job, I was toast. I got home one day and nearly fainted, still rail-thin from the consequences of surgery and setbacks. The next day I developed a rash all over my body. By the following week, I was re-hospitalised and in full-blown liver rejection. If you don't know what that means exactly, it simply means that you're in dire straits health-wise. Your immune system starts to reject your transplanted organ and your body fails. I didn't leave the hospital until we were inching into summer, in mid-May.
Back then I didn't know how to prioritise rest. I didn't think of it as a fundamental element of my well-being. Now it's non-negotiable because I know what the consequences could be and they're not fun. My story is an extreme example, but it illustrates an important point. So today I want to offer you some questions to consider in regards to your own rest. Where in your life are you pushing where you could be loosening your grip? What habits do you have that keep you from fully leaning into rest? Who or what is keeping you from rest? What does your day, month, year look like when you decide to prioritise rest?
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