A Spell for Allowing Rest

Why is allowing rest so difficult?

Blame the usual suspects: capitalism, white dominant culture, patriarchal inhumanism, and the Puritanical cultural roots we can’t seem to dig out.

All this to say: it makes total sense that it can be super hard to Just. Stop. Doing.

I hope these thoughts will help.

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Make Magic:

It’s vital to notice the difference rest makes, in your ability to focus, overall mood, and essential wellbeing.

To rest with bigger impact, tell friends why and how you rest, and encourage rest in all your familiars.

Transcript: A Spell for Allowing Rest

Welcome to Mind Witchery. I’m your host, Natalie Miller, and I’m so glad you’re here. 

Hello, my friend. Welcome. So happy that you are here. Ooh, let me remind you here at the very beginning that Mind Witchery now has transcripts. So, if you prefer to be a reader rather than a listener, you can head over to my website, nataliekmiller.com, and at the top, you’ll see a podcast tab. Click podcast, and then you can go straight to the episode that you’d like to read. The transcript is there at the bottom. I’m really happy to be able to make those for you all.

So, how are you? You know, I often love to begin these episodes by asking you to just really take a moment. You could even press the pause button to answer this question. [laugh] How are you? Just checking in with your body, how’s body? How’s your body feeling? To check in with your vibe, your emotional tone and tenor, what is your vibe like right now? And how’s your mind space these days? How’s the weather up there? Is it clear? Is it cloudy? How’s your headspace feeling? 

And just really taking a moment to answer those questions is key for what we’re talking about today, which is a spell for allowing rest—a spell for allowing rest. So, what I’m finding lately for myself and for my friends, for my clients, I’m hearing a lot of people talking about being tired, being overwhelmed. 

And I’m tempted but I’m not going to go into all the reasons that makes complete and total sense. [laugh] It’s everything from like seasonal change to how intense our world is right now—lots and lots of reasons. But you know what? Part of today’s episode is actually saying we don’t really need to know the reason. What we need to do is to honor the tiredness, to honor the overwhelm, to honor the sense that, for many of us, there’s a feeling of being overextended and under-rested. 

Now, here’s something I know to be true for most of the people in my circles, which certainly includes me, and may very well include you, is that the resting mode, that is, the place where I am receiving, where I am being, where there’s no objective, there’s no goal, there’s no deliverable, this mode of enjoying and self-sustaining and resting is very uncomfortable. [laugh] And it makes sense because so many of us hinge our worthiness on what we do, what we accomplish. 

The dominant culture on this planet—the exploitative, dominant culture on this planet—posits rest as a reward. Oh, you get to retire and enjoy your life after you’ve put in decades of work. Oh, you earn—in many places—you earn your vacation time by working. That culture says, OK, what’s most important is that you do, and then your success in doing is what might allow you to take a break. And that’s not actually the way humans work, the way nature works, the way anything in this universe works. So, let’s get into it. Let’s get into this different way of thinking that I hope will unlock for you the ability to allow rest. 

I want to laugh at myself because what I’m about to say is very sweeping. But [laugh] everything in the universe pulses—everything. Everything has a vibration. Everything has a pulse—meaning your heart beats. It squeezes and it expands. It squeezes and it expands. The ocean moves in waves, and the tides ebb and they flow. And the sun rises and falls. And your belly, when you breathe, rises and falls. Everything pulses. Light waves pulse. 

There’s vibration in everything. Look at the stillest, steadiest thing you can find. It’s vibrating. Everything is. Everything has a frequency—an up and a down, an up and a down. And, so, the nature of being, the nature of everything, is to pulse, is to ebb and flow, is to give and receive, is to expand and contract, everything, including you. It is not possible to sustain flow, to sustain output, to sustain expansion. We ebb and we flow. We expand. We contract. That’s how this whole thing works. 

So, oftentimes, when we have been in a state of expansion, of flow, of output, we will encounter a drawing back in. I almost—I want you to imagine it like the tide. There is wave after wave of creativity coming through you—to you and through you—and coming in and flowing and flowing. But, eventually, there will be a moment where there’s a receding, where the tide begins to move back out. And when that happens, oftentimes our response is to resist it, deny it, ignore it, fight it. [laugh] That’s what we do. Right?

Here I am. I’ve been in this great flow state. I started off the week. I’m like flying through my to-do list. I’m feeling great. And then Wednesday mid-morning, I hit a wall, and my impulse—because doing over being—is to climb the wall, break down the wall, right, rather than to just turn around, and lean against it, and rest. OK. Now, I’m mixing metaphors. Now, you have walls [laugh] in addition to waves. But I think you see what I mean.

Yes, it’s beautiful, and it feels really good when everything energetically is flowing for us, when we can write and give care, when we can flow, because our culture loves flow, loves output, loves and honors and reveres and rewards that state. And, so, of course, it feels really good. But the other part of that cycle—the ebb, the drawing back, the resting—it is a natural and an essential part of the cycle, right? It’s how being works. Of course, there will be a contraction. Of course, there will be a drawing back.

And when we can honor that, and go with it, the flow state will arrive again with less drama, with more ease. Right? The goal actually is to get into a place where we don’t overextend ourselves, where we don’t hit a wall, so that we can move with the energy of our creativity, of our caregiving love, where we can sustain it in a balanced cycle of giving and receiving, of input and output, of ebb and flow.

So, last week, I had this, and a couple of my clients had this. It’s always interesting to me when there’s a little trend. We got into a place that I’m going to—if we continue with the title metaphor—I’m going to call it a rip current—a rip current—where not only was there an ebbing of our energy but because the flow had been so powerful—I mean, I had clients who were making these huge shifts and changes, clients who were feeling really creative and were finally making a lot of headway on a project that they were really excited about—the ebb sort of came, and it came on really strongly, right, which makes sense to balance out. 

Like, there’s this huge growth spurt. Of course, there’s going to be a need for more replenishing. If any of you have animals or children or even plants that have a huge growth spurt, they need more. They need more sleep. They need more food. They need new clothes, right? [laugh] They require more resources because they’re in this growth place.

But upon feeling that ebb, feeling that drawing back, the response of my clients and, dear listener, of myself too—I had this too—was, like, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. Right? And a making that feeling of I don’t, I don’t want to. I don’t want to write this morning. I don’t want to strategize today. [sigh] I made this plan that I was really excited about yesterday, and, today, I just want to crumple it up and throw it in the trash. Right? 

We can take that moment, and we can make it mean, ugh, I guess I’m not cut out for this. We can take that moment, and we can make it mean, ugh, I guess this isn’t the right direction to go after all. Right? We can take that moment, and we can make it mean that something is wrong, rather than take that moment—that feeling of, like, you know what, I don’t have it. I can’t do it today. I really don’t want to do it today—and make it mean what it much more likely means, which is that, oh, it’s time to rest. It’s time to receive. 

Oh, I’ve been doing, doing, doing, and, in order to do more, I’ve got to let myself shift into being mode. I need to receive. So, I was about to say “happily,” but I’m not [laugh]—I actually—I don’t think it’s “happily.” I was going to say, “Happily, that’s what we did.” But, no, we didn’t happily do it. 

In fact, we—all three of us—resisted it a bit. And then what happened is a rip current appeared. So, a rip current, if you know, is where there’s a very strong kind of pulling back from the shore into the ocean. It’s like an anti-tide, and there are lots and lots of reasons for it. But, for the sake of this metaphor, this idea of our energy flowing and ebbing like the tide, I’m going to say the rip current appears when we are denying the natural ebb. The rip current will appear, and it will pull us out of flow mode. 

And what does that look like? Well, a lot of it looks like upper-limiting, actually, which I’ve talking about before; upper-limiting meaning self-sabotage, meaning illness. That rip current pulling us out of flow mode can look like addiction. And when I say “addiction,” I’m talking even things like the doomscrolling that we do, the endless kind of push, push, push through the Instagram feed.

Oh, my gosh, everybody, for me, lately, it’s been this game that one of my girls had on her phone, this game where you, like, match cupcakes. [laugh] I’m not going to tell you the title of it because you should not go look for it because it’s very addictive. There must be some insane dopamine stratagem at the heart of this game. But when I notice, oh, look, there I go, there I go to match up cupcakes again, I’m in a rip current. I am being dragged against my will away from the doing state and into the being state. 

You’re in a rip current when Netflix asks you, “Um, are you still watching?” [laugh] Do you know that moment where you’ve been streaming television so long that the television is like, “Are you OK?” [laugh] It’s that moment, my friends. And I’m laughing about it and joking about it because I don’t want us to feel any shame around it. It’s not a shameful thing. It makes complete and total sense. 

Of course we self-sabotage. Of course we get debilitating headaches. Of course body and mind rebel when it is time to ebb, and we are pushing, pushing, pushing to flow.

So, I did a little research on rip currents. What do you do when you’re caught in a rip current? So, there’s two kind of streams of thought, and I think both of them could be helpful for us. The official recommendation is that when you’re caught—when a swimmer is caught in a rip current, is being dragged away from the shore, the official recommendation is to, (a) stay calm—stay calm. 

So, no catastrophizing, no crumbling up of your plan, no throwing in the towel, no intense self-judgment. Stay calm. Recognize and honor, ah, OK, I am in an energetic rip current. And the worst thing I could possibly do is fight it, so I’m not going to fight it. I’m not going to fight it.

When a swimmer fights a rip current—when a swimmer says, “No, no, no, I want to flow into the shore. I want my creativity back. I want to execute this plan. I want to move forward. I want to do, do, do”—when we fight the rip current, we exhaust ourselves. The swimmer exhausts herself. And I will tell you from lots of experience that exhaustion also comes with an exacerbation of whatever little imbalances or little problems there are.

So, if you have a little thing going on with your health, it becomes a much bigger thing when you’re stuck in doing mode. If you have a little thing going on in your relationship, it becomes a much bigger thing. Right? Those smaller issues become bigger when we fight the natural ebb, the natural receding of energy.

OK. So, I really love this as a metaphor. By the way, I was lighting up to read more about rip currents. Actually, that’s how I fueled myself to come and record this episode. I’m like, you know what, let me go learn about rip currents, and see if that’s inspiring—and indeed it was. 

So, next official recommendation after remain calm is wave your arms, and ask for help. Ask for help. Book a massage. Hire a sitter. Delegate. Ask for help. Loved that.

OK. So, let’s say that, no, you’re not going to ask for help because [laugh] that’s a whole other episode. There are two recommendations from here. The official one is swim parallel to the shore. So, let me translate this in the metaphor as, OK, so you’re not going to move forward on your big creative plan to finish this chapter of your book today. But what’s something that you could do that feels fairly easy? 

This is actually what I did yesterday. I had a plan to finish up some pieces of a curriculum that I’m building, and I just did not have it in me. And, so, I went through, and I just took care of a bunch of small tasks, like getting my kid’s physical forms ready so she can do cross-country running, right? Just what can I do? 

I’m not going to fight the ebb. I’m just going to do some small tasks. I’m going to swim parallel to the shore. Oh, you know what? I don’t have it in me to do this big creative work, but I could go to the grocery store. I could go to the post office. I could do some favors for my future self, and schedule a massage, or research the personal trainer I’ve been wanting to work with. 

I wonder if, right now, you’re noticing, oh, I already do that actually? [laugh] Sometimes, when I don’t have the wherewithal to do my big creative output work, I do actually turn to these little tasks, right? And maybe you’ve even been judging that as like, oh, I just get busy with busy work. But what if that’s natural? What if that’s swimming parallel to the shore, so that you can still be doing but you’re not fighting against the current? You’re doing things that are a little easier.

All right. So, there’s another recommendation too, and this is the one I love, of course. So, researchers of rip currents say that the thing to do is to just float until the current lets you go. They say it’s about three minutes. It’s about three minutes. Just float. Don’t fight it. Don’t swim. Float until the rip current lets you go, because it will. It won’t pull you under, and it won’t pull you all the way out to sea. So, you can float until the current releases you.

This is what I aspire to, my friends, that when I feel like I just can’t, that I just don’t, then I rest. And, occasionally, I’m able to do this. This is something, oh, this is something I’ve been working on. That when I don’t have the wherewithal to show up for other people or to work on my deliverables that I just shift into reception mode. 

I’m not much of a napper, so that’s not what it looks like for me. For me, it definitely looks more like just engaging in very pleasurable activities. OK, you know what? I’m just going to read today. All right. Looks like I’m going to go out to the garden. I’m just going to receive. I’m not going to work on anything. I’m just going to enjoy, and I’m going to trust—and this is the key, everybody—I’m going to trust that the cycle of ebb and flow, that the pulsation, the expansion and contraction inherent in all things, will not let me down. 

I’m going to trust that the rip current will let me go, and that I will have then the strength, the wherewithal to catch the next waves in, to be there bright and fueled and inspired and well, to be able to go with the flow in a big and beautiful way. 

All right, my friend, a spell for allowing rest. Rest is requisite. It’s essential. It is part of the cycle. It’s not a reward, and it does not have to be earned. Rest is requisite. Everything in our universe ebbs and flows, expands and contracts, and so do we. Of course we do. 

Just like we breathe in and out, so do we need to receive in order to give. Just as our heart expands and contracts, so does our creativity. And then, finally, it makes total sense that in our doing- and deliverables-obsessed culture, that it is uncomfortable to let go of the doing state in favor of the being state. 

So, that resistance we feel to pausing, it makes all the sense in the world. And, yet, our ability to rest, and to rest well, to learn—to invoke our metaphor just one more time—to learn how to ride the waves of energy that move in and out, to learn how to spot a rip current, that scroll, scroll, scroll, scroll, scroll rip current, and to avoid it altogether, and, more than anything, to know that when we are doing this, it’s not just for us. 

Yes, it’s for us, absolutely, and also it’s for everyone. It’s for all humanity. The more we can acknowledge our need, our family’s need, our children’s need, our team’s need, our planet’s need, to rest, to receive, to replenish, the more we can honor that, the better we evolve. And that sounds so lofty, but I really believe that our humanity depends on it. 

All right, my love. Rest is requisite. When you feel that energetic ebb pulling you, go with it. Go with it. Let’s—you and I, both—let’s learn how to ride these waves together, and let’s build a world that respects and accommodates this reality. Thank you for listening. Bye for now.

Thank you for listening to this episode of Mind Witchery. To catch all the magic I’m offering, please subscribe to the show, or if you want a little bit of weekly witchiness in your inbox, sign up for my Sunday Letter at mindwitchery.com. If today’s episode made you think of a friend or loved one, your sister, your neighbor, please tell them about it. We need more magic-makers in this troubled world. 

Like all good things, this podcast is co-created by stellar people. Our music is by fabulous DJ, artist, and producer, Shammy Dee. Our gorgeous art is by the sorcerers at New Moon Creative. Mind Witchery is produced in conjunction with Particulate Media, K.O. Myers, executive producer. And I am Natalie Miller. Till next time. 

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