Three Pillars of Transformative Rest
Rest is a shared basic need that we often treat as a luxury. Without rest, our internal systems break down in subtle and drastic ways. Since rest is how we replenish energy, it is a way that power flows, and is inherently political.
Who gets to rest is shaped by the brutal legacy of chattel slavery and colonialism, when the health and lives of black and brown people were considered disposable in service of enriching white people. Who has the power to make decisions about their body is rooted in times when women and children were property. And whose dignity and humanity is honored is in the context of generations of rigid binary gender norms and violent erasure of LBGTQ communities.
Rest is not equally available, and this inequality is maintained for the sake of power. Who benefits from you being too tired to protest? Who enjoys your over-giving and emotional labor? Who enjoys operating without accountability because we're too overwhelmed to follow the news?
Reclaiming rest is layered and complex. While this piece focuses on what you can do to expand your access to transformative rest, I acknowledge that rest is always in the context of our lives and social and political systems.
Today I'm going to break down the three pillars to my approach for transformative rest. Any time we deepen into one of these spaces, we access a new kind of rest. This is absolutely about the journey, not some ideal destination.
Nervous system balance
Gathering awareness
Healthy identity
The upcoming Nervous System Balancing Workshop focuses on how to utilize breathwork to rebalance and access deeper rest.
Nervous system balance was the game-changer for me. For a long time the other two pillars were my focus, and without tools to balance the nervous system I kept getting caught in loops and stalled. Of course my journey in all of these spaces is ongoing, often frustrating and yet consistently rewarding.
Nervous System Balance
Nervous system balance is when you're not hyperactivated or hypoactivated, and are at ease. Many people who experience chronic stress and/or have trauma history have patterns in their nervous system of chronic hyper or hypo arousal. After everything the last two and a half years offered, many people are holding compounded stress in their bodies in ways they never did before.
Signs of hyperarousal include fast shallow breathing, racing thoughts, increased heart rate, panic attacks and hypervigilance. Hypoactivation may manifest as numbness, low energy, shallow weak breath, lower body temperature, and breath holding. Both spaces can lead to disconnection from the body and its intense sensations as a way to cope.
While in these hyper and hypo active states, our bodies' threat response system takes over. You lose access to your brain's prefrontal cortex, the home of problem solving and analytical thought, because in the face of a threat it's too slow.
Perhaps you've looked back on a difficult experience and wonder why you didn't do something that now seems obvious. Well, your system did exactly what it's designed to. Our nervous systems aren't great at distinguishing between lesser threats and serious dangers. Thankfully, there are ways to build new patterns so we're not driven by our threat response system when it's not supportive.
When the nervous system is balanced, we have access to the lovely rest and digest space. Your breath can flow deeper and your thinking brain is available to you. For me this balanced state feels spacious, connected and strong. I am capable of holding uncertainty, have access to my full range of emotions without being at their mercy, and feel fully engaged with my life, here and now.
2. The Power and Limits of Gathered Awareness
Gathering awareness is very powerful in a world where our attention is probably more dispersed than ever before in human history. Many people don't realize how much their attention is pulled in multiple directions, and the incredible resulting energy loss. Let's be clear, there is no such thing as multitasking. Your brain cannot pay attention to two things at once; it rapidly switches attention back and forth, spending a lot of energy with each switch.
Gathering your awareness activates the medial pre-frontal cortex, aka the "noticing brain." The medial prefrontal cortex connects directly to the amygdala, the ancient part of the brain that handles threat detection, and can help calm an overactive amygdala. In addition, as you build awareness of your body's cues, you become more capable of reading your needs, so you know which nervous system balancing tools are right for a given situation.
Gathered awareness is not a complete approach itself, and treating it as such can be harmful. In buddhist meditation centers I practiced in, sitting meditation as gathering awareness on the breath was often taught as the paramount practice. This approach is limiting and is absolutely not trauma informed.
Part of my story is feeling helpless to defend myself and freezing. Sitting meditation unfortunately replicated this pattern. I often felt very intense energy in my body, and became an expert at crying so quietly that the person next to me couldn't tell. I developed chronic pain in my shoulder and low back and felt helpless when teachers instructed me to keep sitting and trust that the intensity would change in time.
It did change– it got worse, and finally I left rigid meditation centers behind. I listened to my body and began rebuilding my relationship to my intuition. I turned to practices that actively transform energy to rebalance the nervous system while gathering awareness in the body, such as breathwork, dance, pilates, qigong and singing.
3. Healthy Identity as Belonging and Unique Self
A healthy identity includes both:
A multi-faceted, secure sense of belonging
Connection to one's full complexity and individuality
Identity is often communicated as belonging to various groups, for example race, gender, sexuality, nationality, profession– all of these refer to belongings.
Belonging is a fundamental human need, so central to our survival that threats to belonging often activate our threat response system. The strongest support is multi-faceted belonging, and belonging that is not dependent upon certain behavior. When one's sense of belonging is overly centralized or conditional, this opens the door to imbalanced and exploitative relationships.
We also all need a sense of self that is not enmeshed in or defined by others, where we have space to embrace our unique magic. This includes connection to our full emotional complexity– fear, joy, shame, anger, grief, sensuality, etc. As identity is constantly changing we also need healthy connection to our past, present and future selves.
Because belonging is such a basic need, many of us have nervous system disruption while trying to connect to our uniqueness or exploring new belongings, especially if this threatens a sense of belonging that's conditional or overly centralized on one person or group.
For example, many of us have complexity in our family relationships, often a key source of belonging and where first wounds around belonging began. There are many times when I felt strong and secure and then with family shrunk into my scared lonely childhood self. If you have felt this, I promise it does not mean that you haven't grown! That said, nervous system balancing can be a powerful tool for shifting out of old patterns and building healthy identity.
There you have it– three pillars, an ongoing and deeply personal yet shared journey to rest. While of course nervous system balance is not the end of the story, it can be a very effective entry point.
The Nervous System Balancing Workshop (Sunday October 23, 2-3:30pm) will focus on nervous system balancing especially through breathwork, with other embodiment practices sprinkled in. There is a 15 minute lecture on the nervous system and protection responses, two worksheets we’ll complete together, and then we’ll do two breathwork practices. Participants receive a write-up of practices we cover for ongoing exploration.