09/21/2026
The Rest That Follows the Harvest
There comes a time when the fires have gone out and the body has not yet realized it is allowed to stop running toward them.
I have been sitting with that in the days since Wholehearted Harvest, thinking about what happens after we gather. After we have listened, reflected, and taken in something meaningful, there is often an impulse to move quickly toward integration. We want to name what we learned, decide what we will do differently, understand what needs to change and how we might carry it forward. I know that impulse well, and I feel it too. What I find myself wondering is whether integration also begins somewhere much quieter than that, in a place where nothing is being named yet. Sometimes the next step is rest.
I think about this often in relation to the people I work with, many of whom have spent long seasons being capable, responsive, thoughtful, and deeply attuned to everything happening around them. They know how to move through difficulty. They know how to solve the problem, care for the person, organize what needs to happen, and keep going when circumstances ask a great deal of them. These capacities can carry us through extraordinary seasons, and I have such respect for them. They can also become so familiar that we no longer notice we are still braced, still scanning, still ready, long after the season that asked it of us has passed.
When the Urgency Quiets
During periods of stress, grief, caregiving, uncertainty, or change, our attention narrows around what is most necessary. We make the decision in front of us, respond to the immediate need, tend to whoever is asking for our care, and move through one day and then the next. There is real wisdom in that. Our nervous systems are remarkably adaptive, and there are times when mobilizing our energy is exactly what allows us to do what must be done.
What I notice is that we often do not feel the full weight of an experience while we are still inside it. The exhaustion arrives later. The sadness surfaces once the practical details have been handled. We may find ourselves more tender, more tired, or strangely less capable at the very moment life has finally become easier, and that can be confusing. Why am I struggling now, when everything is finally okay? Perhaps some part of us has simply sensed that there is enough room, at last, to feel what could not be fully felt before. There is something worth honoring in that timing.
We are often encouraged to move toward recovery as though healing should look increasingly productive: better habits, more insight, more regulation, clearer goals, healthier choices. All of those things can matter. There are also seasons when healing looks much less active from the outside. We may need to sleep. We may need less noise, or an afternoon spent watching the light change, or a day without making meaning out of every feeling. We may need to be supported by something rather than continually asking ourselves what we should be doing next.
Receiving Can Be Unfamiliar
For those of us accustomed to being the ones who carry, receiving can be surprisingly difficult. Even rest can become something we try to accomplish well. We decide to meditate and wonder whether we are doing it correctly. We take a day off and fill it with the tasks we have been postponing. We lie down while part of the mind keeps moving through everything that still needs our attention, and the body is still while we remain quietly braced.
I have become more and more interested in the difference between stopping activity and allowing ourselves to receive rest. That second one feels like a much deeper practice. Receiving asks something different of us. We let the chair, the bed, the floor, or the earth beneath us hold some of our weight. We let another person help. We allow music, silence, breath, or a guided practice to meet us without immediately turning the experience into an outcome.
There can be vulnerability in that kind of receptivity. If our sense of safety or belonging has been woven together with usefulness, competence, or being prepared, then softening may feel unfamiliar, even unsafe. A quieter nervous system can feel strange when readiness has been our normal for so long. Perhaps rest is less a skill than a relationship, one we learn slowly and return to again and again.
The Spiritual Dimension of Being Held
This is one of the reasons Yoga Nidra continues to mean so much to me. There are many ways to understand the practice, including through what we know about attention, relaxation, states of consciousness, and the nervous system, and I value those conversations deeply. I also experience something in it that is harder to reduce to mechanism.
There is an invitation within the practice to let ourselves be supported. The body rests while awareness continues. We move through layers of experience without having to chase, fix, or force whatever arises, and there can be a sense of meeting ourselves underneath the roles and the effort that organize so much of ordinary life. For me, this is where rest begins to take on a sacred quality. Deeper connection often seems to become more available at the moment we stop trying so hard to reach it. We become quiet enough to notice what has been there all along.
Perhaps it is a feeling. Perhaps an image, or a sense of spaciousness, or simply the experience of lying still and realizing that for these few moments, nothing at all is being asked of us. I find something holy in that. Not because every experience of rest needs to become profound, and certainly not because rest should become one more spiritual achievement. The sacredness may live in the willingness to receive the moment exactly as it is, to be here without performing our worth, to let the body be a body and awareness move at its own pace, and to know even briefly that we can exist without needing to become useful to the next thing.
A Small Practice in Receiving
If you would like, you might try something very simple. Find a position where your body can be supported a little more than it is right now. If you are sitting, perhaps lean back. If you are lying down, notice the places where the surface beneath you is already carrying your weight. You do not need to change your breath at all.
See whether you can notice one place where you are still holding yourself up unnecessarily - the jaw, the shoulders, the hands, the muscles around the eyes, or somewhere else entirely. There is no need to make it relax. Just notice. Then you might quietly ask yourself: what would it feel like to let myself be supported here? Stay with the question for a moment, without needing an answer to arrive.
Perhaps nothing changes. Perhaps you feel resistance, or the smallest softening somewhere in the body. You might notice what happens if you allow the surface beneath you to carry one percent more of your weight. Only one percent. And then, if it feels right, you might ask: what am I still carrying that may not need to be held so tightly right now? There is no need to solve whatever comes. You can simply acknowledge it. Sometimes the practice is not putting something down forever; sometimes it is discovering that we can set it beside us for the length of one breath.
The Space After the Harvest
I keep returning to the season we are moving through together. Harvest is associated with abundance, with gathering, with what has ripened, and there is a quieter movement that follows it. The fields rest. There is less reaching toward growth. What has been gathered is given time to nourish.
I find myself drawn to that rhythm as we move beyond the Wholehearted Harvest Summit and into the deeper work of this fall. There are several threads I want to keep exploring with you: the healing intelligence of nature, the ways animals bring us into relationship and presence, what sound can reach when words feel too small, and what becomes possible when we step outside the ordinary pace long enough to hear ourselves differently.
These are some of the reasons I created Rekindle Your Magic: as an immersive retreat rather than a series of workshops. Some experiences can begin in an hour, and they deepen when we are given continuity - enough time, space, nature, rest, sound, reflection, and relationship for the body to finally stop anticipating the next demand. Four days in November at Full Circle Retreats in Inverness, Florida, where the mornings are unhurried, the horses graze a few steps from where we gather and the chickens go about their morning without consulting anyone, and no one will ask you to be useful before you are ready. I think we need that kind of space more than we admit. A place where nothing has to be earned before we are allowed to receive. A place where insight can settle into experience, and where we can remember that growth does not always ask us to reach forward. Sometimes it asks us to soften enough to let something reach us.
If something in you leaned toward that as you read it, you can read more about the retreat here. There is no urgency in the reading. You are welcome to simply look, and to notice what happens in your body when you imagine yourself there.
As you move through this coming week, I wonder what rest might mean for you if it did not have to be productive. What would you allow yourself to receive? What might become audible if you did not have to make anything happen for a little while? Perhaps something in you has been waiting for exactly that kind of quiet, and perhaps, for now, the invitation is simply to let yourself be held.
Rekindle Your Magic takes place November 12 through 15 at Full Circle Retreats in Inverness, Florida. Over four days we bring these threads together - nature, contemplative practice, Yoga Nidra, sound, creativity, ritual, reflection, time with the rescued horses, goats, and chickens, and spacious time away from the usual rhythms of everyday life. Space is intentionally small so that the container stays intimate. You can see the full details and reserve your place here. I'll be sharing more in the coming weeks about why each of those experiences belongs within the retreat, and what I hope becomes possible when we let them work together.
rekindleyourmagic2026.com
