Welcome to Week Two of the Permission to Rest Immersion!
I hope you are settling in well. I am enjoying getting to know you in our group thread from last week. If you haven’t had a moment to introduce yourself over there yet, please do. This thread will remain open until the end of the immersion.
A few quick notes before we continue—
Please save the date for our live group session on October 16th, 2024 @ 9-9:45am PST (Zoom link will be sent out next week)
You will find all of the current and past immersion posts here. Feel free to bookmark this page so you can find it easily
To listen to the immersion audio sessions and join our conversations from your phone, download the Substack app
Now, let’s begin….
Reclaiming Your Rhythm
Our bodies have a natural propensity to go along with the pace of whatever is around us, from the environment to people to our smartphones.
Take a moment right now to consider some of the ways that the speed of our culture has taken over your innate ability to regulate your own rhythm and live a more balanced life.
What do you notice when you are bombarded with information on your screen or text notifications?
What happens when you drive on the freeway?
What do you feel in your body when you imagine slowing down while living in a society that will do anything to speed you back up?
There are many simple actions you can take to reorient the pace of your life—like turning off smartphone alerts, practicing driving in the slow lane on the freeway (when it’s safe to do so, of course), softening the speed of your speech, or spending a few minutes outside in fresh air.
It’s also important that we learn about entrainment, a natural phenomenon that happens when our rhythms sync up with our environment. Entrainment is part of our biology, which is why it’s so easy for us to join up with external tempos that might not align with our internal desires.
This is especially true in our yearning to slow down and embody rest.
We can be entrained to go faster, matching the rushed pace of a large city, or slower, downshifting to the pace of a sunset.
We must remember that while we long to slow down, we often hurry to match our speed-driven culture because it is the ruling rhythm of our time. And often, especially in the beginning of starting a rest practice, when we put in energy towards slowing down, the influence of our always-on culture has us rushing all over again. When this happens, it’s easy to become frustrated and want to give up.
Regardless of how many times we catch ourselves in a rhythm that doesn’t feel restful, we must pause, take a breath, and orient ourselves inward to our own tempo.
Feeling our own rhythm is not a practice to execute but a consciousness to develop.
In this budding awareness, we are reminded that it takes sustained effort to feel our own pace, to rest despite the magnitude of the external pull to rush, overwork, over-consume, distract ourselves, and avoid the renewal that is critical for each of us.
It’s not our fault that it’s hard to rest in the face of our overwhelm and culture. It’s not our fault that we inherited a planet that is in dire straits, a country whose systems aren’t working for the benefit of all life forms, or a legacy of collective trauma that didn’t start with us.
No matter what our minds tell us or what difficulties we face on this journey, it’s not because of some personal failure that we struggle to follow the beat of our own drum.
The antidote is to cultivate awareness of the places where we become entrained to a rhythm that doesn’t belong to us, that doesn’t bring us closer to rest.
A Note for Empaths (the feelers of other people’s feels)
Learning to feel your own rhythm can be a life changer if you’re empathic like me and struggle to connect to yourself, not just in the context of culture and environment but in relationships as well.
In my book How to Breathe, I share some words about my personal experiences with empathy and how it is often a marker of growing up in a dysfunctional household or experiencing developmental or relational trauma. When we’re operating from empathy, it can lead to feeling responsible for other people’s emotions, not being able to create and sustain boundaries, and having trouble differentiating ourselves from others.
Try this for a moment. Think about a time when you witnessed someone expressing anxiety.
Did you feel anxious too?
Did it shift something in your body, your heart rate, breathing, or thought process?
*TLDR*
When you have empathy, you feel deeply for others.
When you are an empath, you feel other people’s emotions, energy, or physical symptoms in your own body.
If you’re an empath, or identify as HSP (a highly sensitive person), chances are that you might struggle to locate your own rhythm in the presence of others.
Rest Practice: Music Meditation
One of my favorite ways to practice allowing my body to shift into a restful state with very little effort is through listening to relaxing music. Listening to calming music can help us unwind by soothing our autonomic nervous systems, releasing dopamine in our brains, and decreasing cortisol in our bodies.
Because of entrainment (the natural phenomenon for our rhythm to sync up with our environment), when we tune into peaceful music, our bodies will organically begin to downshift into a relaxed state. Taking some time to listen to music can be very helpful when our emotions are getting in the way of our practice, giving us an opportunity to process them and rest.
If you already have a sense of what type of music helps you relax, please feel free to use that for practice this week. If you want to try something new, I have linked a playlist below. I like to use binaural beats in the alpha frequencies (8–13 Hz), as they encourage relaxation and decrease anxiety. Binaural beats in the theta range (4–8 Hz) are linked to REM sleep, reduced anxiety, relaxation, as well as meditative and creative states.
Alternatively, you can try variations of classical music, ambient sounds, or nature soundscapes. Find what music helps you downshift.
How to Practice: Music Meditation
This week’s practice is going to be a little different because I want you to practice with music that helps you relax and drop down into rest.
First you will listen to the short recorded breathing exercise below to get a feel for how you will be practicing while you listen to music