It Takes Rest to Cultivate Resilience
I sat down to write yesterday but I just couldn’t do it. My moon blood had just started flowing and all my energy had settled itself into the primal trembling of my womb. And even though I could barely see through my woozy brain haze, an old (but not ancient) story pressured me to push through and write something - at least make some progress. Procrastinating writing is a pattern of mine and today was the day I’d set aside to write, so dammit, I had to try.
But my body needed something different and so instead of writing, I surrendered into a dark and quiet place underneath the usual momentum of thoughts and action. I let myself listen for a long time, longer than what seemed possible in the busy days before the pandemic. And with life ebbing during my monthly flow, I felt a deep-seated remembrance of a truth I’d buried but not forgotten.
Rest restores balance and resilience to a stressed system. Habitual, forced action is a barrier to deep wellness. The ingrained cultural values of advancement, innovation, and improvement have left many of us depleted and out of touch with the natural rhythms that have sustained and evolved life on Earth since the beginning of time.
In lieu of writing, I let myself feel sad for all the years I ignored the signals of my body’s cycles. I lamented about the demands of modern life and the constant, unnatural stress our nervous systems endure just to keep up. I felt despair about the dire consequences we’re facing as a species and a planet because human progress doesn’t slow down to honor right-size, right-time, or the uniquely expressed intelligence of all things. And I wondered, how much balance would be restored if we spent half as much time nourishing ourselves and each other as we did ‘taking action in the pursuit of progress’?
Depending on your personal circumstance, what I’m talking about might sound like impossible self-indulgence. The responsibilities of motherhood, cleaning messes, and showing up strong for work and relationships are real and they require us to put our personal preferences and rhythms into the larger context of the systems we’re a part of. Sometimes, our choice looks like turning to caffeine when what we really need is to STOP and power down by sitting down and breathing slowly and deeply for three minutes.
When loopholes like caffeine become a way of life, our vitality and resilience suffer. Instead of being fluid, engaged, and available, we become hypervigilant, defensive, and on guard. Our wild, embodied intelligence and erotic wellness get buried underneath our stress responses and we undermine the very old, evolved mechanisms designed to rejuvenate us. When we stop listening to our bodies, we lose our ability to trust and respond instead of incessantly react.
The good news is, the wellness of millions of years of well-tested evolutionary intelligence is right here, waiting to be nurtured and utilized, within each of us. We generate life force, we evolve, and we create deep sustained belonging when we understand and tend the wellness of our Triune Autonomic Nervous Systems. We spend so much time training our minds but our nervous systems are responsible for creating our reality more than anything else.
When we’re able to respond rather than react, when we’re in touch with our moment to moment boundaries and limitations, and when we have a well of resilience to create and connect from, we’re able to support ourselves and those who need us. We are in the midst of a tremendous unknown. Life as a result of this pandemic means we are experiencing more uncertainty, fear, and loss than humans have in a few generations. Many of the systems we’ve always relied on (for better or worse) will not recover. Losing this framework may be terrifying but it can also be liberating. With more time and less to lose, we can lean into our inner resources, the natural world, and get to know the wellness that is at the root of all things.
This wellness requires tending. Our nervous systems are designed to notice both the threats and the opportunities in our surroundings, a brilliant mechanism to help us survive and thrive. In moments like this one, where the level of uncertainty likely outweighs anything we’ve experienced before, it takes conscious effort to turn our attention to resource, possibility, and wellness.
A few simple ways to do this include bringing to mind things, people, and experiences you are grateful for. Putting your attention on your breath and feeling the sensations – no matter what they are – of the inhale and the exhale. Looking out your window and allowing what the birds and the bees are doing or how the clouds are moving across the sky to have an impact on you.
We are well equipped to navigate with generativity and resilience if we know how to nourish and use our systems well. Our nervous systems are tuned to the circadian rhythms of the Earth’s rotation and are designed to regenerate in cycles of activity and rest. After tending to myself in the quiet all day yesterday, I woke up this morning feeling refreshed rather than more depleted. Every day is different and choosing not to chase progress yesterday has given me access to a deeper well of creativity today.
If you can relate to the heartbreak of leaving yourself behind, if you’re ready to educate yourself and restore your connection with your Nervous System, or discover for the first time what that could feel like, and if you want the support of an experienced guide and a community of women, consider joining us for The Verdant Collective’s next live, online, 8-week course, Erotic Embodiment and the Triune Autonomic Nervous System. You’ll leave with a deeper relationship with the system that is ingeniously designed to evolve, attune and tune us, to each other, and to Life itself.