Permission To Rest

Last week I had conversations with two different women on the same day that were exact carbon copies of each other.

What were they about?

Giving yourself permission to rest over the holidays.

Both of these women knew they needed to rest. But they also both had a nagging voice in the back of their head saying they should use their time off productively, like spending a day organizing the basement.

If you really want to organize the basement and feel like you have the energy to do it - go for it.

But I also want you to know that you don't have to.

In fact, you don't have to do ANYTHING extra over the holidays.

I believe you can give yourself permission to rest anytime, but this time of year it's practically state sanctioned! Nearly all business slows down. Most people take some kind of time off.

TAKE ADVANTAGE OF IT.

Lay on the couch watching The Queen's Gambit. Put together puzzles with your kids. Sleep more. Go for slow walks. Paint (and not painting the house - fun painting!).

Whatever rest means to you -- give yourself permission to go there.

And when the inner critic shows up saying that you should be doing more, you should get those things done on your to-do list, you should be productive -- tell yourself a new story.

Tell yourself that you deserve rest. You need rest. You don't have to do anything more to earn rest -- you just get to take it.

With that, I want to leave you with a few lines from the Mary Oliver poem Wild Geese that I recently shared with the women in Beyond Perfect, my group coaching program:

You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves.

To rest,
Heather