11:11 Waves Blog 44: Rest

Every Monday, I share 1 question for you to contemplate, 1 idea from me, 1 quote from others, and 1 inspiration for us.

This week’s topic is: Rest

This past week I felt very unwell and was forced to pause and rest. In today’s fast-paced world obsessed with productivity and performance and, as I navigated my personal "rest resistance", I discovered that resting is not as easy as it sounds. Resting well actually requires intentionality and effort. Rest is not inactivity, rest is doing. Matt Haig puts it beautifully: “Just as we need pauses between notes for music to sound good, and just as we need punctuation in a sentence for it to be coherent, we should see rest as an intrinsic and essential part of life that is needed for the whole to make sense.”

One Question for you

Sometimes the most urgent thing you can possibly do is take a complete rest.

Discuss the question here.

One Idea from me

This week, I am sharing three practices on how to cultivate intentional rest in your life. I also would like to acknowledge that, in our society, the ability to choose rest, to have time to rest and to access restful spaces is unequally impacted by our connection to privilege and power. Because of this consciousness, the practices developed below are as inclusive as possible and focus on developing self-awareness about your relationship with rest, reconnecting with yourself and starting to access rest in small ways that are possible based on your own personal circumstances.

Define rest: Each human being is unique and so rest may look and feel different for different people. This week I invite you to take few minutes and explore what rest looks like for you and reflect on the following questions: What does it mean for you to really, truly, rest? What does rest look and feel like exactly? How does it feel to be fully rested? What activities count as resting and what activities don’t? This last question was especially helpful for me in the past when I discovered that many hobbies or activities I was choosing and considering “rest” (e.g. reading a book about leadership or coaching) were not really allowing me to rest and they were just a continuation of work in another way.

Get curious about your resistance to rest: We live in a culture that values productivity, efficiency and success over self-care, leisure and wellness. Guilt, shame, perfectionism, pressure, lack of boundaries, fear of missing out are some of the many reasons why we resist rest. This week, I invite you to get curious about your resistance to rest and reflect on the following questions: How may your resistance to rest be linked to old habits and belief systems? What are you avoiding? How do your environment and circumstances enable you (or not) to meaningfully and properly rest? Once you have identified your resistance ask yourself: What’s one meaningful change you can make?

Cultivate rest in your daily life: This week I invite you to give yourself permission to prioritize rest by integrating it in your daily life. To do so, you can experiment with taking intentional pauses more often during the day, using your transitions (when you change activity) as an opportunity to re-center and slow down or planning your day with more buffer time in between activities. You can also check out my article on Recharging and experiment with the seven types of rest identified by Dalton-Smith.

One Quote from others

“Our legacy is a legacy of exhaustion. Rest is key to connecting to the wisdom of our ancestors and creating a new world.” Tricia Hersey

One Inspiration for us

This week I am sharing a recommendation for a book called Rest is Resistance written by Tricia Hersey. The book explores what it would be like to live in a well-rested world and defines rest as a form of radical resistance to the current culture of hyper productivity.