Rest & Relaxation in 2024
Betsy Ranum MA, RN, NBC-HWC
Community Holistic Nurse, Integrative Health & Wellbeing Coach
“We are divine and our rest is divine. There is synergy, interconnectedness, and deep communal healing within our rest movement. I believe rest, sleep, naps, daydreaming, and slowing down can help us all wake up to the truth of ourselves. Rest is a healing portal to our deepest selves. Rest is care. Rest is radical.”
Tricia Hersey, Rest Is Resistance
Most of us have gotten the memo at this point: we should rest. Relax. Stress is a huge risk factor for nearly every chronic condition. Sleep is essential. “Mindfulness” and mind-body practices, not so long ago regarded as fringe, are increasingly and widely recognized elements of a better quality of life.
In Rest & Relaxation Coaching, I help socially conscious and creative people access states of rest and relaxation. More specifically, I help people remember why and how they want to rest and relax. Because if you are like me–and nearly everyone I know and care about–rest and relaxation is a struggle.
Rest and relaxation…is a struggle. How’s that for a mindf**k?
In this jacked-up, adrenaline-fueled, time-is-money, obscenely unequal society, most of us are living lives that make rest and relaxation complicated at best. Elusive. Challenging. Sometimes seemingly impossible. Fraught, heavy, uncomfortable, raw, frustrating, enraging.
Can you relate?
Rest and relaxation are human needs, and our birthright—like clean air and water, food, health care, community, the conditions necessary to grow and thrive. And like all these human needs, rest and relaxation have become distorted, commodified, walled off, designated as privilege, rather than mammalian need, human right. At this moment of late stage capitalism, the barriers to rest are not just personal, they are systemic: deeply historical, politicized and racialized, socioeconomic and cultural as well as practical and psychological, emotional and spiritual.
I’ve been working on this Rest & Relaxation Coaching offering for over a year. In early 2023, I asked around for people who were looking for greater mind-body-spirit balance, and interviewed willing participants. I was looking for which of my skills (as a community holistic nurse and integrative health coach) could address peoples’ needs.
I spoke with people looking for more opportunities to be creative, to feel alive, and to connect with the natural world while balancing responsibilities as caregivers: parents, educators, social service providers, healers, and health care workers. I spoke with artists and highly creative people trying to untangle themselves from the internalized “profit motive” capitalist driving voice in their head. I spoke with professionals and retirees deeply concerned about how to contribute meaningfully amidst national and global realities of violence, authoritarianism, and climate crisis.
These people were committed to being of service in the world, but their energy had become depleted and frayed. Reflecting on mind-body-spirit balance brought insight…but also a well of grief and discomfort that had no home in their demanding daily lives. They knew practices and tips for “self-care,” but found themselves up at night tossing and turning about things that were entirely immediate, uncertain, anxiety-riddled, and heartbreaking–and yet utterly beyond their control.
At first, I was stumped. As I looked for themes, common problems for which I might be able to actually offer a solution, the threads were all over the place. The main commonality I found was these were all adult humans living in the United States in the 2020s who give a f**k about living in a just, sustainable, and flourishing society—whose nervous systems and mind-body-spirits were telling the story of the gap between what they love and value, and where we are collectively at this moment in history.
No quick tips or hacks for that one.
Nope. No simple, 5-point, bullet-list, spa-day, weekend retreat, 10-day plan, look-at-the-bright-side mindset shift was adequate for the challenge.
Still, I looked further for patterns. And the patterns that emerged had less to do with what was wrong, and more with what people were longing for. In fact, these longings were simple and elegant in their similarities.
I heard again and again how, despite knowing what to do (even having a meditation practice, or a decades-long creative practice), there was this longing to be in states of rest, relaxation, and receptivity more often. Not to be more “productive” necessarily…but more so to show up with greater presence for loved ones, for their work in the world, and to gain more clarity about how to be fully alive in a world on fire. Over and over again, in different words but with the same spirit, I heard a longing to be open to feeling the flow of life.
To rest and relax into the flow of life.
After gathering these insights (and steeping myself in the work of Tricia Hersey, author of Rest Is Resistance), I started offering Rest & Relaxation Coaching at MIHS. Ultimately, Rest & Relaxation Coaching is a creative process. And like many creative efforts, it’s as much the work of peeling back and chipping away as it is creating anew. The work is ongoing, a gentle and powerful unlearning, a coming home to self.
We excavate. “I really should make time to rest” might be the first layer. Beneath that, maybe “but I feel guilty and lazy when I rest.” This often opens up to “rest and relaxation might make space for emotions and experiences that are incompatible with all the s**t I have to do in my daily life, and I’m not going there.” Here, we are closer to the energy, the heartbeat, the taproot.
What’s different and potent about coaching, though, is that we don’t focus on what’s wrong. This is not medical treatment or psychotherapy; we’re not diagnosing the issue, or processing childhood wounding or trauma–although we honor the wholeness of our human complexity.
Instead we bring attention to strengths and resources, to what is already working, to what is possible. We hold space for how rest and relaxation might be experienced in mind, body, and spirit: what would it feel like? What would be going on in your mind in a state of optimal rest and relaxation? In your body? In your spirit? It is from here that so often powerful insights, rememberings, images, visions emerge. A new architecture of possibilities reveals itself.
Then, we practice. This can look like practicing mind-body-spirit modalities like Reiki, simple breathing techniques, guided imagery, biofeedback, drawing, moving, connecting with nature. Learning about other services at Minnesota Integrative Health Studio and beyond, deepening and expanding the range of support for rest and relaxation practice. Brainstorming, creating plans, setting intentions, challenging assumptions and nagging inner critics. Connecting to self-compassion, wonder, awe, love.
Through practice, like a magic eye drawing, nothing moves and yet something new is visible. Either/or collapses, and expands into both/and. When we hold the grief and rage and tightness that is “I don’t have enough time” with self-compassion and gentleness, time becomes a bit more bend-y and mysterious. Pockets of time may present themselves, bubbling to the surface. “There’s not enough time” might shift toward “how might I create time?” or even “how do I make peace with time?”
Rest & Relaxation is slow and subtle, potent and powerful. By creating space, through unconditional positive regard for our deepest inner knowing, a third “R” can emerge: reimagining. In the words of one R&R Coaching client: “I came in looking for tools and tips…and I got a paradigm shift.”
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Learn more about Rest & Relaxation Coaching here, or book a free virtual Q&A conversation with Betsy to find out more. To explore how Traditional Chinese Medicine, community acupuncture, therapeutic bodywork, Pilates, Reiki and energy work, infrared sauna, and our other services at Minnesota Integrative Health Studio can support you in your rest & relaxation practice in 2024, check out our website or contact us at info@mnintegrative.com or (612) 345-5648.
