Rest: An Essential Tool for Spiritually Aligned Success

When your body or your life let’s you know you need to recharge, do you listen?
Or do you push?

Do you tell yourself all the reasons why you can’t, shouldn’t, or won’t rest?

Do you wait until you are wiped out, sick, physically sore, and emotionally challenged?

You have 24 hours and maybe a family to raise, a business to run, commitments to honor.

Absolutely essential to your success in any of those endeavors is creating support for regular rest and renewal.

I’m talking actual systems and plans here! If your typical response is, “I’m fine, I’ll have a cup of coffee,” then I am willing to bet money that your body hurts and you daydream of everything just stopping for a bit.

You can create regular time for self-care, and find that just a few minutes of simple breathing, a small luxury, a sunrise habit, or a special book supports your balance and clarity.

Or you can wait until your body, your emotions, or your life circumstances are throwing the equivalent of an all-out tantrum.

When you create systems to support you, you make getting the support you need graceful and habitual.

You can rely on your systems when you are feeling vulnerable, rather than responding to feeling vulnerable by demanding that you feel stronger, now.

When you practice listening to yourself this way, you gain immediate benefits. Appropriate self-care increases your motivation, inspiration, and energy. Listening to your needs when they are subtle requests, and before they become screaming demands, deepens self-trust.

Your basic sense of security in the world depends on this essential self-trust: I am the adult in my own life and I will meet my needs.

Can you say that softly, gently, and trustingly, knowing that if you ask you will get all the help you need? Can you believe it? Or can you say it, but only in a hard sense, in a way that leaves you feeling defended, sad, and all alone?

Deepening your spiritual connection and your experience of safety and abundance in all areas of your life is the journey of embracing this sense that you are your own divinely, deliciously, lovingly responsive adult.

Over time and with practice, you notice the places where you self-betray, and you choose to stop.

You choose to honor your needs with compassion, deep self-love, and responsibility.

Personally, it’s taken me a long time to learn such a basic concept: Stop when tired. Learn to rest rather than chug a 4th coffee. Learn to honor contraction as a vital, beloved part of the process, rather than something to be skipped over in an addictive chase for expansion.

There is enough time.

There is enough support, money, resources, love, and patience.

Set it up for yourself. Honor yourself that much. Take care of yourself.

You don’t have to wait until you are sick. You don’t have to secretly embrace whatever crisis you feel gives you permission to stop or accept help. You have all the permission you need right now.

Leave us a comment – on a scale of 1-10, how responsive are you to your rest and renewal needs?