Why I’m all about an embodied experience of rest.
In my 20’s, before becoming a dance therapist, I was (surprise!) a big dancer. One of those high-energy dancers, wearing fuzzy red boot covers and a tight black sports bra, and who loved fast paced, intense songs: Gogol Bordello’s “I Would Never Wanna Be Young Again” or Pendulum’s “The Island.” My moves were big and strong. I was a powerhouse. That was the energy I brought into my first experiences of dance meditation, and began learning the DANCEmandala Movement Meditation style that you may recognize as the dance form I still lead today.
And maybe it was because of this that one of my most memorable experiences from my DANCEmandala training was actually one day that I was just exhausted. Spent. Depleted. Done for.
All day long we had been practicing movement and body work, and by the time we began our evening dance practice my body was totally spent. I literally collapsed on the floor. Since this type of meditation practice is focused on listening to body sensations and following natural body and movement impulses, it would have been completely acceptable, and even encouraged, to give in to this crucial need for rest and stillness in that moment.
Instead, I discovered how incredibly difficult—impossible even—it was for me to surrender to this exhaustion and simply allow myself to rest.
Not only did I keep trying to force myself up into movement, but when lying down I was plagued by a very negative internal dialogue:
“You should be up and moving, stop just laying here.”
“What a waste of time. You’re missing everything”
“What are you so tired. You don’t have any reason to be tired.”
“Everyone is judging you. Everyone is going to think you’re not doing it right.”
Sound familiar?
I was being so hard on myself for the natural state that my body was in.
This was one of the first times in my life that I really consciously experienced how incredibly hard it was for me to slow down…To stop. Be still…and to rest when I so obviously needed to.
I bet you can relate. We live in go-go-go culture where rest is considered the enemy of productivity rather than what we NEED to sustain ourselves.
Luckily, the wisdom of that experience kick-started a much longer process of exploring rest.
I started to ask myself, “What does it mean to rest?” And “Why the heck is it so hard?”
As you can imagine, these questions became more and more pertinent as I made my way through grad school, graduated and launched my private practice in 2020 (of all the years!) and entered the professional mental health field amidst a crisis of clinician burnout.
Our recent national and global context has caused an extremely high rate of fatigue, overwhelm, and burnout for therapists and our clients. In my practice and personal life, I was hearing over and over again from folks struggling with exhaustion, having difficulty slowing down, and not feeling restored even after engaging in copious self-care activities.
This collective stress and trauma is especially multilayered for people with marginalized identities who are perpetually in a position of having to over-prove their worth. BIPOC, queer, femme, and disabled folks have to work at least twice as hard to be successful. To be viewed as valuable. You have to use your productivity to prove that you matter in a world that devalues your inherent identities and humanness.
This path of inquiry into rest deepened as I began to explore neurodiversity and the particular challenges of neurodivergent folks trying to keep up with our society’s impossible standards. Our neurodivergent brains and bodies seem to be constantly on the sacrificial block. My own patterns of sprint -> crash -> sprint -> crash became more than I could ignore, and I had to take a good, hard look at my own patterns of neurodivergent burnout. Yikes!
What I’ve come to realize is that our ingrained and self-destructive patterns around activity, stress, burnout, rest, restoration and self-care are often driven by our beliefs that productivity = self-worth and that self-care = selfish and that it’s not safe to slow down lest we be flooded with feelings of guilt, grief, anxiety, worthlessness or existential dread. Maybe “just keep swimming” and “push through” and “you can do it” isn’t always the best answer.
All this inspired me to offer a dance/movement therapy group entirely focused on the embodied experience of rest.
In the fall of 2021, I led a group called Deep Rest and Restoration. We came together to explore and deepen our relationship to stress and rest. My intention was not only for participants to learn an embodied approach to self-care that they could take with them, but also for the sessions themselves to be restorative. I’ve since completed five rounds of this therapy group, and expanded it into a longer, richer, and more in-depth program.
When considering how best to lead this group, it gave me an opportunity to crystallize what I’d learned about restful states from both my personal and professional experience.
The main premise that I work with is that rest is less about what you do (an activity) and more about how you are (a bodily state).
Drawing from my training in dance/movement therapy, trauma therapy, and dance meditation, I assembled the five main elements I believe we need to access rest and restorative states.
These 5 elements that inform the Deep Rest and Restoration group sessions are:
-
Transitional Time:
This one is key because you can’t just slam on the breaks after going 100 mph down the freeway! To access restful states you need to give yourself TIME to slow down. We need to give ourselves a “free-way off-ramp” so that our bodies can recalibrate from high speeds to low speeds. I believe that the longer and faster you’ve been going, the longer this off-ramp needs to be. And the longer the off-ramp is, the deeper you can go into restful states.
How to do this: Create buffer time between activities, after your work day, or before bed. You can start simple by pausing in your car to take three deep breaths before you go inside, or creating a simple bedtime routine. Look at your calendar and notice where things are packed back to back, and where you can create space. Then, make that space an effective transition time by filling it with the following 4 elements.
-
Movement:
We MOVE through the stress cycle best not by thinking our way out of it but by shaking off all the activation that is happening in our nervous systems. When our bodies evolved, the threats we encountered looked a lot more like tigers and less like emails. Our body learned to pump us full of energy so that we could fight off the tiger or run quickly away! Movement is our response to danger that carries us to safety. But how much movement do you get when you respond to that awful email? Your body wants to respond to all the threats you feel inside you and around you (including mental, emotional, and imaginary ones). But in the modern world, this movement response isn’t so obvious. You sit on the couch while you watch election results roll in. You doom-scroll in your bed. You muster all your energy to speak calmly to your triggering boss. You suppress fidgeting, rocking, or shouting to avoid social rejection. In the modern world, we need to intentionally ADD movement into stressful situations so that the BODY knows we have responded to the danger, and the stress chemicals it has produced can be quite literally flushed from our systems.
How to do this: Add movement into your transitional time! Without movement, we are just stewing in the build-up of stress chemicals! Of course my favorite movement practice is DANCE. But you can also run, do push-ups, shake, or groan. If you have limited movement ability, you can also sing, make art that expresses your emotions, or do a Progressive Muscle Relaxation exercise. Just find some way to release all that shit! Psychological researcher Emily Nagoski recommends 30 minutes of movement a day for those experiencing chronic stress. Dance is amazing because it is so adaptable and free-form. When you dance, you can release energy in your body in a way that is authentic and unique to what is happening present-moment in your body-mind. Also keep in mind that there is a difference between movement that RELEASES energy (such as dance or running) and movement that GATHERS energy (such as yoga or tai chi). We want the releasing ones here!
-
Body Awareness:
“Powering through” often requires us to disconnect from our body signals. You shut down feelings of tiredness to pull an all nighter. You shut down feelings of hunger to skip your lunch break. You shut down feelings of fear or grief to keep reading the news. To truly take care of ourselves, we have to reconnect. When you truly listen to your body, you will get vital information about how you are feeling and what you really need in the moment, which then empowers you to tend to, nourish, and restore yourself. We have to get out of the rat race in our heads and into the innate animal wisdom of the body!
How to do this: Do something that feels nice in your body (take a hot shower, do your skin-care routine, put on soft clothes, take all your clothes off, eat your favorite food, get a massage, cuddle a pet) and pay attention to your sensory experience (what can you see, feel, smell, hear, taste?). Put on a guided body scan meditation. Practice some gentle self-massage. Feel your feet on the ground and notice the texture of the floor underneath you. Practice naming body sensations in a neutral and non-judgmental way (do you feel a sensation of warmth? Tingling? Heaviness? Tightness? Softness? Nausea? Pain? Lightness?).
-
Safety Cues:
Rest requires that you feel safe. But not just on a mental level…safe in your body, in your being, in your inner self. You have to move from merely thinking “Yeah, of course I know I’m stressed but I’m safe, I’m fine” to actually *communicating* to yourself that you actually are safe on a somatic level. Remember that stress is at its core a response to threat and danger. The sense of safety needs to be felt in your cells, and in body language that is nonverbal.
How to do this: Take a few moments to look around your room, name a few colors, see where the exits are and sit in a place where you can see all of them. Place your hands on your heart and belly and take a few deep breaths into that self-to-self contact. Use a weighted blanket. Practice your favorite grounding technique whether it’s a breathing exercise, a visualization of a safe place, or some gentle movement. If you don’t have any grounding practices, Google “Polyvagal Exercises” for ideas and instructional videos.
-
Connection:
Nothing does more wonders for our nervous systems than co-regulation a.k.a. being around safe, supportive, grounded people. We are tribal animals that survive in groups. We need to know we are not alone, that we are connected and can endure hardship together. This is especially vital at times when the world feels unsafe, when we inhabit marginalized bodies that are subject to oppression and violence, when we live within sociopolitical systems that are inherently stressful. We need places of community, where we can gather together and feel safe, seen, and understood. Nervous systems will sync and influence each other, so being around others that are also taking time to rest can enhance the experience. This is why exploring rest in a group setting is so powerful! Together, we can drop into deep states of nourishment, knowing that our trusted, intimate little community has our back.
How to do this: Be with your people! Call your friends. Hug your friends! Cuddle with your partner. Attend a community event with people who share your identities. Lean back to back with a friend and breathe together. Go to an ecstatic dance or a partner dance class. Sign up for the next Deep Rest and Restoration therapy group! 😉 And if you are feeling particularly isolated, or just not able to people today, remember that you can also connect with animals (we love our pets!), with the vast Earth underneath of you, with spiritual beings or guides or God or your ancestors. Take a few minutes to visualize someone (real or imagined) that has your back and imagine what they would do or say to you in this moment.
My own journey of finding rest has been deep, multi-layered, and such a gift.
Don’t get me wrong, I still love to move my body with intensity! You’ll still find me in a Gogol Bordello mosh-pit, dropping Pendulum tracks into my playlists, and showing up at kickboxing classes! But I’ve come to understand that the real magic of this intensity is what lies on the other side. Sure, there’s nothing like an ecstatic rush, but what feels truly meaningful is the peace, spaciousness and calm that opens up AFTER this release of energy. I love the softness, sweetness, and stillness in the second half of a dance wave. I love movement to tracks like “Conga Jog” and “Kothbiro,” and the subtlety there that I couldn’t appreciate before.
At this stage of my life, I am still very much finding my way on this path right alongside you. I deeply value the art of embodied rest and love sharing it. But I am by no means perfect! Teaching these 5 elements is a constant, loving reminder for me to practice them myself, and I am always in some process of unwinding old beliefs, remembering my body, and returning to these tools again and again. Releasing ourselves from perfection is yet another way we can allow more rest.
I know the transformative nature of rest has made me a better person, partner, therapist, and dancer.
I want this for you too!
X
Lauren
P.S. If you want to nerd out even more on all the details of these 5 Deep Rest Elements and where they came from, check out the below video of my virtual conference presentation on this topic!
