Contents
A book by Ashley Neese I read in 2024 on the biology and importance of rest and mindfulness. It’s a guide to specific practices for incorporating rest into one’s life, especially for those like me to whom rest feels out-of-reach. Its crucial point for those of us who tend to think “I’ll rest once everyone else’s needs are met” is that we can’t meet anyone’s needs when we’re physically exhausted and psychologically burnt out.
Practices which resonate with me
- Cultivate a Rest/Work rhythm: schedule periods of rest in between periods of work, a long break at least every 90 minutes and/or more frequent shorter breaks. Brains get tired, so while it may seem more productive to stay focused as long as possible, you’ll get less effective over time without breaks. This is also good for your body: my physical therapist advised me against sitting or standing in one place for more than 45 minutes without a break to stretch and walk around.
- Orienting: is a somatic practice to ground oneself in the present moment. Especially when feeling intense emotions, focusing attention on the body can keep us from being overcome by them. The practice is simple: name five things you can see, name four things you can hear, name three things you can touch within immediate reach, name two things you can smell, and name one thing you can taste.
- Moon rituals: while there’s nothing supernatural about the moon, lunar cycles are a natural part of our biology and culture that we can use to mark the passage of time and schedule regular rituals of rest and replenishment. Neese suggests using the new moon as a fresh start, a reminder to clean up and say goodbye to things and habits that aren’t serving us. And she suggests using the full moon as a time to reflect on the past month, either alone or in community.
- Earthing (or grounding): is a simple practice of putting our bare hands or feet or whole bodies in direct contact with the Earth. While it sounds a bit woo, there is empirical evidence to support its benefits.
- Tending to our feelings: not a practice in itself, but a reminder that rest can be a time when suppressed emotions, often strong ones, can naturally surface (indeed, it’s why so many of us avoid rest despite the cost to our health of suppressing emotion). When such emotions do come to the surface, it’s best to give yourself the time and freedom to feel them, and then notice how much better we feel afterward. One goal of a rest practice is to rest and thus feel our emotions more regularly so they don’t build up and overwhelm us.
- Rest visualization: when we can’t escape to the woods or a quiet room, merely visualizing a peaceful place to rest can have many of the same benefits. The more we involve all our senses in this visualization—imagining the sounds in our ears, the temperature on our skin, and especially focusing on our bodies’ response to visualizing a place of rest—the more benefit we’ll get.
The author on what rest has taught her:
Rest has taught me that I don’t have to be on all the time. Rest has brought me into a level of intimacy with myself that I haven’t ever known. Rest has offered me the opportunity to learn when I am coming from survival mode and being reactive in situations where it’s unnecessary and continued to redirect me to my purpose. Rest has shown me that it’s depleting not only to my body but to my heart, psyche, and creativity to continue operating from a stressed state rather than allowing myself the grace to tap into rest and come from a place of resource. Rest has given me the capacity to listen with my entire body, allowing myself to be moved to tears, heartbroken, enraged, awake, and present. Rest has reminded me, over and over, that I am not a separate individual but an interconnected being who can have a mighty impact if I continue to honor my needs for renewal and tend to the cries of our planet.
Rest has increased my capacity to sit with hard things, really hard things, and meet them from a place of flexibility, attunement, and integrity. Rest reminds me that healing isn’t a permanent state. Rather, it’s seasonal and like the shift in weather, there is a time to rejoice and a time to restore. Rest has taught me the power of learning to be satisfied, and that rest in itself can be an incredibly fulfilling practice.