Think of this post as your hall pass, your permission slip to pause, stop being a good girl and rest – because sometimes trying to do very little is actually hard work.
We self sabotage rest. We feel we need to be productive and making progress, to tick things off a never ending to do list.
Indeed many women have grown up in good girl conditioning of achieving = worth or praise. These are widespread societal behaviours internalised by women to be nice, to smile, to please others and to do more- all regardless of our own well-being, needs or preferences.
Stanford University carried out a study on desirable adjectives to describe women… cheerful, loyal,compassionate and warm rated high. For men? Independent, assertive,decisive. This gender bias can be a contributing factor in why we all find rest elusive.
Make yoga a space where you do what you want, take what you deserve, say no, speak up through choices you make, stand your ground and practice doing what you want and feel like – and lose the guilt.
Rest is a skill to build and learn – then relearn over and over. By coming to a yoga class we have found the strength to deprioritise other things and to slow down, in attendance itself we are saying that other stuff can wait.
We rest to remember. We rest to relax. We rest to create space for new things; ideas, feelings, releases, replays. We rest to process and daydream. We rest to reconnect, who are we in stillness with no distraction of busyness? After rest we can give our loves the best of us not just the scraps of what’s left of us. We rest to take a rebellion, a stance, less achieving and more receiving is the battle cry.
