Permission to Rest

We all have the power to transform our lives from the inside out by simply slowing down.

Permission to Rest is your invitation to slow down, look inward, learn to feel your own rhythms, and value rest as a deeply healing, empowering, and spiritual way of life.

• Resting is one of the most impactful practices we can adopt. When we take a few moments each day to pause, we are reclaiming the innate wisdom within our bodies and within the natural world

• A gorgeous package and bite-size learnings make this a great gifting and self-purchase proposition

• The last few years have left us all feeling exhausted and depleted, and it looks like this polycrisis is set to continue

• Burnout has become one of the World Health Organisation’s key concerns for the coming years

• There is an ever-ready demand for practical self-help and improvement books, with titles regularly topping the Sunday Times bestseller charts

• Ashley Neese holds an MFA from the California College of the Arts and is certified in breathwork and Hatha yoga, is a regular contributor to GOOP, opening their 2018 On Health summit, and is the author of HOW TO BREATHE (Ten Speed Press, 2019)

@HQstories

21st December 2023

Hardback 9780008652555 £16.99

eBook 9780008652548

For publicity enquiries please contact:

UK: HQPressOffice@harpercollins.co.uk

Australia: jo.munroe@harpercollins.com.au

New Zealand: sandra.noakes@harpercollins.co.nz

To the courage it takes to pick up this book and do this work.

To the grief that goes hand in hand with slowing down.

To the revolution that is rest, may we honor its powers to restore, to repair, and to reclaim the parts of ourselves that we have hidden, betrayed, or numbed in our efforts to avoid the medicine we need.

To the holiness that is available through cultivating rest practices, giving ourselves our birthright.

To rest itself, providing the space to vision a future that cares for the planet and the whole.

01. In Praise of Rest (6)

02. What Rest Is—and Isn’t (20)

03. The Neurobiology of Rest (34)

04. Our Struggle to Rest (62)

05. Resting from the Inside Out (96)

06. Resting from the Outside In (128)

07. The Deeper Call (176) Rest Practices (196) Notes (198) Gratitude (206)

In Praise of Rest

Resting is one of the most impactful practices we can adopt for selfcompassion, emotional well-being, collective care, and environmental repair. When we take a few moments each day to pause, to feel our exhales, to listen to the sounds that are present, or to notice the way light bends around a corner, we are engaging in a subversive act of reclaiming the innate wisdom within our bodies and within the natural world: the wisdom of rest.

When we practice resting, we allow ourselves to follow an organic rhythm that has the power to heal, to restore, and to liberate us from the oppression of overwork and constant productivity of our culture. When we practice resting, we engage in revolutionary acts that create social and environmental changes, rippling out to shift all aspects of life. Yet most of us will say, on any given day, that we simply cannot take the time to rest. I get it. I’ve been there.

I’ve been on the burnout train more times than I care to admit. I’ve struggled with addiction to substances, to work, to being of service, and to social media. I’ve pushed myself to the point of being bedridden more than once. I’ve fallen into the trap of believing that if I just do more, help more, work more, and keep pushing past my limits, I will finally feel like I am enough. And then I will be able to relax.

I’ve avoided rest for many of the reasons you’ve probably avoided it too: it’s inconvenient and uncomfortable. Yet, after years of dodging the medicine I needed the most, I’m here to tell you—there is no substitute for rest. There is no way to escape our fundamental human need for renewal. Individually and as a culture, we have been failing to take care of this essential need, and it’s causing high levels of stress and depletion within ourselves, our communities, and our environment.

We are exhausted. We are overwhelmed. We are weary.

Our bodies need rest. Our minds need rest. Our hearts need rest. Our relationships need rest. Our creativity needs rest. Our culture needs rest. Our Earth needs rest.

The promising news is that the value of rest is gradually on the rise in our collective consciousness. Enough of us are recognizing that feeling depleted and perpetually exhausted doesn’t have to be our baseline. Enough of us are tired of being sick and tired and are choosing to rest, despite existing in a culture that tells us that to rest is to admit weakness and needing to slow down is something that we should be ashamed of.

It’s okay to slow down. It’s okay to pause. It’s okay to rest.

My Journey to Rest

If you are new to my work, I am a trauma-informed breathwork teacher and the author of How to Breathe: 25 Simple Practices for Calm, Joy, and Resilience. I work with clients individually and facilitate group work through retreats and trainings. Even though I have devoted much of my life to healing and service work, I didn’t come to rest with ease. I came to the practice of rest like I showed up to my first twelve-step meeting: broken down, disconnected, and completely out of options. And just as I surrendered in my early twelve-step days to the truth of my addictions and how far I would go to avoid the pain I carried, learning how to rest involved a surrender.

When I first started questioning the pace of my life, I had been in recovery groups and therapy for more than a decade and had a strong yoga and breathing practice. And my life still wasn’t working. Something was missing, making it impossible for me to settle for extended periods of time. My body asked me in many ways to slow down, to take a break, to feel, and I was not listening. I felt I had no real value unless I kept myself busy, calm-seeming, looking like I had it figured out and could do life all by myself. Eventually I experienced a series of emotional and physical breakdowns while sober. I hit one wall, then another, until I finally hit bottom and could not go on.

Heeding the advice of my twelve-step sponsor, I put myself on a plane back to my hometown of Atlanta, Georgia, where I spent five weeks at my mother’s house, slowing down, resting, and allowing her to show up for me. During my time there, I napped almost every day. I took walks with my mother around the lake by her house. We cooked nearly every meal together. I stopped going on social media. I took a break from my friend group. I went to yoga classes. I started to breathe a little deeper. I took care of myself and allowed my mother to support me.

For years I muscled my way through life, believing it was superior, even noble, to take care of myself without the support of others. I unconsciously participated in some of the most damaging illusions that are woven into the fabric of our culture: the false idea that we are separate, that our individual needs are more important than the needs of the whole. When I began my journey to rest, I became aware that self-reliance was depleting me many times over and that despite my best efforts to uphold the individualist framework in my life, I was never truly on my own. I was in fact interdependent. Becoming aware of that interconnection gave me the necessary support to rest, to regroup, to recalibrate, to feel the beating of my heart and envision a future I wanted to be a part of.

After years of being on the run and feeling alone, I was finally willing to press pause on my life and spend focused time cultivating a relationship with the medicine that I desperately needed—the medicine of rest. Going back to my hometown in Georgia was a turning point. I surrendered to the cries of my body and made a commitment to stop avoiding what I was terrified to face if I slowed down long enough to rest: myself.

It turned out that learning to rest in our dominant culture of “always on” busyness and grind until you burn out was much more of a challenge than getting sober. Resting was something much more elusive to me. I didn’t know I needed it, or that I was allowed to do it, let alone cultivate it into a healing practice. Returning to Georgia was one of the best decisions I ever made for my mental, physical, emotional, and spiritual health. It set me on a path of uncovering why I kept pushing myself into periods of burnout. This led me to untangle and start healing the trauma I had inherited and experienced in my life. This journey proved to me that even though I struggled with believing in myself and trusting myself (and my body), I was worth taking care of. I was worth feeling rested.

Why Rest?

My experience with rest has been anything but linear, anything but smooth. I’ve had to learn through fits and starts that rest isn’t just an activity you do occasionally when you’re exhausted. Rest is a practice, and practices require consistency, dedication, and a willingness to show up. Even when you’re too busy. Especially when you’re too busy.

Resting for little while here and there isn’t enough to create meaningful, sustainable changes. Although you will likely feel a shift after just a few moments of resting, rest is a cumulative practice. This means that the benefits and transformation you experience from rest will grow and deepen over time. We learn through repetition, through practices that are repeatable, and through our devotion to keep up with our practice when it’s tough to rest. We will face many difficult moments as we open ourselves up to rest. Furthermore, when we are willing to commit to a consistent rest practice, we begin to touch into the wisdom of rest that is already present within our own bodies no matter how far away it feels, how much our bodies have suffered, or how many times we have abandoned our bodies along the way.

When we rest, we move toward feeling more connected, present, and satisfied in our lives. When we rest, we open ourselves up to align with seasons of renewal within ourselves, within each other, and within nature. When we are more rested as individuals, we can transform our always-on culture of inequality, individualism, and frantic productivity into a more thoughtful, grounded culture of interdependence and well-being. And, when we are more rested, we have the energy and capacity to work together to create a revolutionary future built on practices, ideas, and solutions that are in service of all forms of life.

Benefits of Rest

Rest is indispensable and it has many significant outcomes for our personal and collective well-being. We are tired to the bone, and the revitalization rest offers is a soothing balm to anxiety, exhaustion, overexertion, and illness. Rest is a potent nutrient, as essential to the body as water. When we’re dehydrated, we suffer, and the body’s vital functions are disrupted. The same goes for rest. When we’re drained, overworked, or in a state of chronic anxiety or stress, we suffer, and in turn our communities weaken.

If you are resistant to the prospect of slowing down, you’re not alone. Take a few moments to consider the following six holistic benefits of rest and notice what you resonate with.

REDUCE YOUR ANXIETY and STRESS

Stress is part of life. It’s impossible to eliminate stress completely. What we can do, however, is begin to revise our relationship to stress. Making time for rest helps us curb chronic anxiety and stress by engaging the parasympathetic nervous system, bringing us out of our habitual responses and into relaxation and social connection, both of which are proven to boost immune function and mental health.

HEAL YOUR BODY

Our bodies are designed to thrive through a series of short sprints versus the 24/7 grind that modern life demands. Taking a short break, even for a few moments, can offer the refresh we need, helping us sustain our energy levels throughout the day. A break is a short pause on work, activities that are physically demanding, too much sensory stimulation, or anything that invokes high levels of emotional exposure or strain. Pausing throughout the day with rest practices like the One-Minute Rest (see page 18) or Orienting (see page 60) helps us restore our minds and bodies, leaving us happier, more grounded, and stable.

EXPAND YOUR CREATIVITY

Taking time to replenish our reserves organically leads to increased creativity. Moments of quiet and reflection help us generate new ideas, solve problems, and approach our lives, each other, and the issues we are facing collectively with more openness, a precursor to creativity. Data shows that our brains spontaneously activate during rest, and the brain’s stores of attention and motivation are recharged. This can lead to an increase in creating answers to open-ended problems, like inventing new solutions for complex situations.

REFINE YOUR DECISION- MAKING

Resting naturally improves our ability to make decisions. When we do anything for too long without rest, such as working or engaging in an emotionally challenging conversation, our capacity for concentration is greatly reduced and our emotional reserves can become depleted. Frequent pauses for rest breaks that are regularly scheduled or taken on the fly, provide us with opportunities to refresh our perspective and as a result make better decisions overall.

EMBODY a REVOLUTIONARY LIFE

Few things are more inspiring and needed in our times than choosing to follow the beat of a restorative rhythm rather than following along with the anxiety-provoking pace that permeates our society. When we support the body to access homeostasis and rest, we push back against the cultural norms that have us more distressed, burned-out, and overstimulated than ever before. Choosing to rest will help us move through life with more ease, compassion, grace, and steadiness. It offers opportunities to embody our day-to- day with less tension and more flow. Resting is how we learn to anchor into our intentions and embody a revolutionary life.

Choosing rest as one of the foundations and guiding principles in our lives has the potential to change how we care for the whole. When we rest, we give others permission to rest more too. Thus the healing ripples out to touch even more of us. When we rest, we give the Earth and all living creatures and plants much needed time to regenerate. Resting is one of the most powerful practices we can drop into each day. It reminds us, with every exhale, of interconnectedness, our true nature. In the face of the layers of destructive programming in our culture to pursue life as individuals (rather than as part of a whole), accumulating more than we need, and living in fear of each other, resting gives us the replenishment we need to fight for instead of against each other, the planet, and all forms of life.

Why I Wrote This Book

I wrote this book as a companion to How to Breathe. I wanted to offer a pathway to rest, a pathway that I desperately needed in my life as well. I know I am not alone in struggling to rest. I know I am not alone in feeling depleted from the extractive culture we are rushing in, ever striving for more yet increasingly isolated, disconnected, and unsatisfied.

I craved a book about the healing powers of rest that invites us to explore the beliefs and patterns in our bodies that make it impossible to value slowing down. I longed for a book that encouraged us to develop a relationship with slowness and showed us why widening our capacity to sit with discomfort in all its forms was an essential aspect of rest. I was thirsty for guidance that was grounded in the latest research and heart-centered in its approach to viewing rest as a spiritual form of nourishment as well as resistance to the hustle culture that infiltrates our lives and keeps us from resting. I was yearning for an accessible and

pragmatic toolkit of rest practices to help us explore the ways that rest has the power to repair and restore our communities and our Earth.

Permission to Rest is that book. My sincere hope is that it will encourage and inspire you to make resting part of your life.

Let the rest revolution begin!

How to Use the Rest Practices

Throughout each of the seven parts of this book, you’ll discover rest practices as well as reminders to give you space to pause, reflect, and absorb the lessons. For a complete list of the rest practices detailed in this book, please refer to page 196. Some parts of the book, by the nature of their specific focus, offer more practices than others.

All that is required of the rest practices is a curiosity to try something new, or perhaps something we’re already familiar with but haven’t yet been willing to practice. There is so much that fragments our attention, demands our energy, devalues our bodies, and breaks our hearts in a day and works against us getting the rest we deserve and desperately need. The rest practices in this book do not require us to make massive changes to our lives overnight, or even in a month. Some moments or seasons in life will call out for rest practices more than others; but consistency is the key—even when we’re feeling rested! This is part of the cumulative effect of rest and what makes deep healing and sustainable transformation possible. Resting is part of our biology; our systems have an innate intelligence to restore themselves, even if we’re out of practice or we never learned to rest.

Less is more. Slower is better. Those are two secrets for using the rest practices detailed throughout this book and for integrating more rest into your life. The thing to know is that you cannot get rest wrong using these

practices. There is no “right” way to use the rest practices in this book, just like there is no perfect way to rest. I wove in a variety of options hoping that you will experiment and try new ways to practice resting. If a practice doesn’t feel supportive, move on. If you find that you’re really resonating with one particular rest practice, do it as often as possible.

When we’re under the influence of the binary thinking of all-or-nothing culture, it can be easy to fall into the trap of believing that we need to have the “right practice.” This limiting belief keeps us from resting in the first place. We don’t need to worry about which practice is “best” or most “effective.” Furthermore, we can’t hack our way to rest. Using rest as a means to hustle or produce more is perpetuating the oppressive and repressive systems that we’re already living in—models that are designed to keep us separate, reproduce our suffering, and keep us unrested. Though you may gravitate toward some practices more than others, all of the practices in this book are restful and have the potential to support your journey toward embodying a rested life.

Before you start, I suggest taking a little time, even just a moment, to consider why you want to practice resting. If you’re not sure, ask yourself why you were drawn to this book. When you begin to get even a little clarity on your “why,” it’s much easier to commit to your rest practice with consistency. Begin trying a few different rest practices.

Once you land on a rest practice that resonates with you, practice it daily for as long as you can—a month if possible. Don’t worry about being perfect at it, or missing days. Your practice is going to be imperfect, you will miss days—it’s okay. When you remember, pick back up and start again. If it’s helpful, add the practice to your calendar, set a reminder in your smartphone, enlist an accountability partner, or include your friends, children, neighbors, or coworkers in your practice. The two main things to remember are begin and keep it simple.

Please take your time with this book, and move through it at a pace that feels right for you. Every aspect of the book design—from colors to layout—was created intentionally to support a deeper connection to the feeling of rest, however fleeting in the beginning of your practice, inside of your own body.

You are not alone in needing to rest, in feeling depleted, or in questioning if the pace you are moving at is nourishing the deeper life you are called to embody. Rest is more than a reset. It is a profound restorative practice that we can lean on and turn toward to access our innate compassion, wisdom, and healing.

Permission to Rest is a compassionate call to action. It is an invitation for you to pause, look inward, learn to feel your own rhythms, and value rest as a deeply healing, empowering, and spiritual way of life. This book is a revolutionary reminder that we have the power to transform our lives, our communities, and our planet from the inside out.

One-Minute Rest

TAKE ONE MINUTE , seated or standing, to bring awareness to where you are. Notice the light, colors, textures, and shapes of the objects or life around you, such as any furniture or plant life. Listen to the sounds around you—the wind blowing through a tree, a dog barking, a car driving by, or a child laughing. Locate yourself in this moment for just one minute. Studies show that even a few moments of present time awareness can bring our brains and bodies into a state of calm, a state of rest.

Repeat this practice as often as needed throughout your days. This is a supportive way to begin downshifting your nervous system to bring yourself into the present moment—the only place we can access rest. •

You deserve to rest.