What is Rest Coaching?

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Dear community,
Happy summertime! I hope you are soaking in the earth’s full bloom. Just like the fruit of the earth is revealed during this season, so is the fruit of our personal labor. In the spirit of summertime, I am  excited to reveal to you the unfurling of a new branch of my professional practice: Rest Coaching.

I completed this intensive training with Karen Brody at Daring to Rest last December, after previously completing her yoga nidra facilitator training in 2021. I spent the winter and spring steeping in and integrating the materials and practicing with both myself and individual clients, and became certified as a Rest Coach with Daring to Rest in May of this year.

So far, every time I’ve mentioned this Rest Coach journey to friends, I’ve see this their eyes light up with curiosity as they: What’s Rest Coaching?

And every time someone asks me this question, I break into a huge grin. Because Rest lights me up.

If you are  living and working in this day and age, chances are you are under-rested.

​And I’m talking about so much more than sleep.

I am speaking to the rhythm in which we live our lives. I am speaking to the hyper-productivity that the dominant culture of extractive capitalism demands from us.

I am talking about the grind.

The never-ending rush from one task to the next, with the underlying anxiety whispering in your ear telling you you did not check enough tasks off from your to-do list today.

I am speaking to ancestral and cultural exhaustion contracts that keep many of us in deeper states of unrest than others due to institutionalized racism, sexism, and classism.

I am speaking to the thriving epidemic of loneliness, because so many of us are too busy grinding or too distracted by our screens to drop in meaningfully with one another. I am talking about the feeling of emptiness you may feel at the end  of your work day, the anxiety that arises when it comes time to slow down, the impulse to reach for the screen or food or substances you may use to ease the  transition from busy-ness to sleep—sleep that is all too often punctuated by restlessness.

So how do we remedy all of this? What, indeed, is Rest Coaching?

Here now, I invite you to take a gentle, deep breath in…and a  long slow exhale, imagining the following scene.

Rest creates a sacred container. A soft place where I can calmly welcome any impulse, sensation, emotion. I can sit with whatever comes and share a pot of tea in a sun spotted lush garden, in a slow relaxed way. If I haven't rested well for a while, the feelings that come up at first might be uncomfortable. I can embrace them all as I am embraced by rest.​

​Rest Coaching follows the framework of the Rested Path™, a nonlinear path that leads us to the reclamation of our bodies, our voices, and our imagination. Reclamation of space to process and integrate our experiences, reclamation of our autonomy from the normalized lifestyle that will suck us completely dry if we allow it.

When we embark upon the journey of Rest, we begin with practices that rest the body. The mother practice with this work is yoga nidra, which teaches the body and mind to rest at progressively deeper and deeper levels, actually slowing down the brainwaves as we move towards a place of stillness.

Through yoga nidra and several other practices that help the body remember the rhythm of rest, we begin to reclaim our bodies from the tyranny of grind culture.

As we come home to this remembrance in our bodies, this remembrance of relaxation, remembrance of being tuned into the natural world, then we begin the sacred work of processing our emotions and experiences. As we do so, we begin to hear an inner voice that is our own voice, our rested voice--the part of us that knows what it knows, apart from all of the external noise.

As we develop a relationship with our rested voice, this unmistakable inner knowing guides us to take rested action— or the necessary and individualized steps towards building and maintaining a rest-centered life.

We come to understand here that walking the Rested Path™ does not simply mean laying down and withdrawing from activity. Living a life of rest is rather a balance of Being and Doing. It  is also a practice of learning how to notice when we are walking in a rhythm of rest, and when we are not, and knowing how to find our way back to Rest over and over and over again.
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Busy people turn away. Rested people turn inward.
—Marion Woodman

​There we have the three phases of this Rested Path™: Rested Body, Rested Voice, and Rested Action.

Curious about more specifics?

Here are examples of practices used for the Rested Body Phase:
    —In-Body Coaching (a somatically led intuitive coaching practice)
    —Journaling  and self-reflective  exercises
    —The use of personal story as rest medicine
    —Pendulation and holding opposites to find the third way
   —Nature Practices, using the rhythm of the natural world to tap into Rest


Examples of practices used for the Rested Voice Phase:
    —Solitude and Silence Practices
    —Creating a Rest Altar to support your Rested Path
    —Inner Mothering
    —Journaling and embodied exercises of  focused on:
             -Working with ancestral allies
             -Shedding ancestral exhaustion contracts
             -Finding Your Pleasure Lineage
    —Finding and setting boundaries that support more rest in our lives


And examples of practices used for the Rested Action Phase:
  —Breathwork and movement based practices
  —In-body coaching, self-reflective journaling practices, and visualizations to find your personal rest prescriptions.
 —Frequency Sorting: a tool for building a productive and rest-centered schedule.
   —Intuitive practice to find your personal Rest Rhythm
   —Practices  to reclaim imagination and creativity in our lives

If you feel unrested, you are probably living in someone else’s dream.
—Adrienne Maree Brown 

Yes, it is true that most of us are sleep deprived. And yes, rest coaching CAN help with getting more regular and deep sleep. But as you can see if you’ve read this far, it is much, much more than that.

If you know me, you know I am a huge advocate for centering rest in our lives in this culture of hyper-productivity in which we reside.

This sounds simple right? Just rest more!

In my personal journey with rest, I have found it’s incredibly far from simple. Truly centering rest is an act of profound resistance. It demands a daily commitment to move away from the dominant narrative of doing more, producing more, and putting our own needs last. If this kind of rest sounds like something you need more of in your life, I hope you will consider letting me support you.

Ways you can work with me:

1 on 1 coaching tailored to your personal journey. Reach out here.

Group work. Learn more here and join the waiting list here and here.