The Real Reason You Can't Rest (It's Not Laziness)

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You finally got the afternoon off. No calls, no kids, no to-do list staring at

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you. And instead of relaxing, you cleaned a closet nobody was going to see. Or you sat down for 10  and

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then found yourself back at your laptop just checking one more thing. If that's you, I need you to hear this clearly

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before we go any further. That is not a discipline problem. That is not you being bad at relaxing.

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That is your nervous system doing exactly what it was trained to do.

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Today, I'm going to show you why rest feels unsafe to a body that's been in survival mode for years and what

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actually has to happen before rest can feel like rest instead of a threat.

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There are three things I want to walk through with you today.

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First, why just relax is impossible advice for a nervous system that's still on guard.

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Second, what's actually happening in your body when you try to stop and can't? And third, the one shift that has

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to happen before rest becomes accessible to you again.

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First, why just relax doesn't work. Rest is not the absence of activity.

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Rest is a state of your nervous system has to feel safe enough to enter. If you have to spend if you have spent years or

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decades being the one who holds everything together, your body has learned that staying alert is what keeps things from falling apart.

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So when you stop moving, your body doesn't interpret that as safety. It interprets it as a gap. And a gap to a

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nervous system trained for viligence feels like danger, not relief. That's the whole reason rest can feel more

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uncomfortable than the busyiness is supposed to replace.

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Second, what actually is happening in your body when you sit down to rest and your mind immediately starts producing a

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task list. That is your sympathetic nervous system. The part of your built the part of you built for fight or

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flight and consistent readiness.

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Refusing to hand over control. It's not that you don't want to rest. It's that some part of you doesn't trust what will

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happen if you're not managing everything.

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This is the same system that kept you safe during whatever season taught you that viligence was survival.

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A chaotic home, an unpredictable parent, a period where slowing down really did mean something would fall apart.

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Your body hasn't gotten the memo that the danger is over. And third, the shift.

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You cannot control, you cannot think your way into rest. You have to prove safety to your body in a language it

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actually understands, which is sensation, not logic.

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That means short repeated moments where you let your body register that nothing bad happens when you stop. Not a two

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week vacation, a few  on purpose, on a regular basis

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where you let your shoulders drop and nothing falls apart.

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That's how the nervous system slowly updates its evidence.

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rest becomes possible not because you found more time but because your body finally believes it's allowed.

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And I want to share my story of when this really came home to me.

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Now, I have been practicing little moments of just being quiet and still and sitting in my in my place,

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just allowing if something comes up, I would go ahead and

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breathe. Sometimes I'd have to yell at myself to stop and breathe because, you know, when something comes up and you're feeling it and all of a sudden you're like in this really cool moment and then

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all of a sudden you're like kind of thing.

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And that was when I started realizing that I had control over whatever was happening on the outside or in my head, I had control over all of it. So with

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that in place, when when I had this collapse in May,

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when my water heater broke, oh, what do you know? I had a dream

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about a water heater once. Anyways, I um I realized how exhausted I was. I

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realized how much my nervous system was still healing.

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I learned that there were seven forms of rest at that time and I was experiencing all of them at once. S had gone to Texas

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for the month. I was not a happy camper, but I knew there was a reason that he chose to do that. So, I stopped

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complaining, accepted it, and surrendered. Now, it's not like I was afraid that he would be gone a month. I didn't have any of that.

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It was just I felt like I just needed him around to just hold myself stable because he was as overwhelmed with this water loss as I was.

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And it seemed like nothing ever seemed to change that we're always dealing with water problems. And you know, I know houses that's the biggest thing you deal

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with is water issues. But it seemed like we just finally get the crawl space done and the water heater breaks breaks and there's another flood going on. Now, we

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did catch it early enough, so that was a good thing, but it still didn't feel good. And we both just scattered doing

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what we knew that we could do at the moment. And we didn't tell each other what to do. We just we just took matters into our own hands.

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When he left is when I just really didn't have the capacity to do much more. I sat a lot. I

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still moved forward in my business. I was still doing things, not a lot. I wasn't taking on a whole lot. I was just getting into a new community where I was

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learning all sorts of things that I was so excited about, but my brain could not handle it.

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And so I would spend a lot of time just being, you know, I was cooking. I was doing

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things that made me feel good at that point. And when I did that, there were times when I would sit down and all of a

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sudden this little girl would come up and it'd be like, "No, we're not going to do that." I'm like, "Okay." Or something else would come up and I would

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start understanding a little bit more about the body, body, mind, spirit alignment. And that little girl just kept coming up and just pissing about

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whatever she was pissing about. And I'm just like, "Oh my god." You'd think I was going crazy. But what I realized at that moment is that this was a lot of

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old memory stored in my body, in my nervous system. And I had to allow her

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to speak. I had to allow the emotion to come up. not judge it, not argue with

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it, not get mad at it, just allow it to do what it needed to do. And when I did

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that, I started feeling a piece in my body that I did not even know or recognize. I

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And I remember going into my kitchen and I was going to make some dinner and I'm like, "Wow, I feel really good." I was like, "I've never felt this on the

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inside." And it was such a cool feeling because I realized it was because I was allowing

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old thought patterns to move. I allowed her to rage. I allowed her to get grumpy. I allowed her to be whatever she

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was 5, six, seven, eight years old, whatever it was. And I realized that as the adult,

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I had to just kind of comfort her and say, you know, those days are gone. We don't have we're not we're not in those places anymore because this little girl

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had to defend herself. She had to survive her life and she didn't have the capacity or the knowledge or the wherewithal to do that. So she did what she could do to the best of her ability.

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So when she started grumping, I realized that that was her way of, you know, somebody's finally hearing her, somebody's finally listening,

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and it was me. And I had to love her and accept her because this little girl took on a lot.

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And because she took on a lot, I had to allow her to let that rage leave and to let her anger surface and to allow her

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to start breathing and feel safe again where she could drop her shoulders even if it was just for an inch. And even if

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it was just for a moment, she just needed those moments to feel safe and not constantly looking over her shoulder. And yes, it was an experience of a lifetime to be going through that.

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Now, I still have those moments, not like they were in May where it was like everything was just, you know, like just everything's flying up out of

everywhere. It was just the most bizarre thing I had ever experienced in my life.

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But the calm and the peace that followed was like the anger was leaving even more.

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The peace that I was generating was monumental to me because I never felt peace. Looking over my shoulder was, you

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know, it was non-existent. I mean, when my father passed away, that was the one thing I stopped looking over my shoulder. But this went to a deeper

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level. This went to where the little girl was okay and knew that she was okay now and that I was there and I was

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holding her and loving her and letting her know that we can move on to the next level of life and that she could start

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moving because you know whatever we store in our body from whatever the tragedies and the traumas that we incurred stay with us until we look at

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them, face them, heal them, love them, forgive them and let them go. And with her, I just let everything go. I let it

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come up. I let it surface. I let it do what needed to be done during that period of time. What I discovered also

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that my capacity was coming back. And in the last several months, what I've noticed the most is even if my capacity is not at 100%.

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I can still move forward without the overwhelm.

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And that's a big deal, too, because when my capacity hits its limit, there's an overwhelm that comes in and it's just like I have to stop. I feel like I need to save myself from the world.

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I don't, but that's what I think. That's that's that nervous system reaction that I always feel. And I've noticed that I

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don't do that. So, when I'm feeling not overwhelmed, it's not that's not the word anymore. It's just almost like it's too much to handle.

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and I just allow it to come out and do what it needs to do. And I can still move forward. And if I can't do something, then it's like, it's okay.

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Just walk away. Just rest. Do whatever you need to do. Switch gears. And that's the biggest thing that I've learned to

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do. And these little permission slips that I'm giving every week, it's five . That's all it is. five 

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with yourself to start to regulate your nervous system.

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That's that's really easy to do because we all have five . Even if we don't think we have five , we do.

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Get up five  earlier and and do a permission slip.

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And they're on they're on the live section in my on my channel. So, you don't have to worry about that either.

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Everything is there for you.

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And when you start giving yourself permission to give yourself that moment to know that you're safe in that moment that

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everything is perfect just the way it is. This is by divine by divine providence what's happening that you

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created this. You start realizing what all you're capable of doing. You can start breathing. You start finding boundaries.

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you find your voice.

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There is so much that happens and it's just one little baby step. And right now I have like this I'll have 10 up this

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week but it's five  and I tell people I said you know my permission slips are kicking my own butt too because I do what I say.

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They don't tell you go do this and I'm not doing it because I do because I want my nervous system healed.

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I want 100 capacity to keep moving forward in the direction of my dream.

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And I don't care if it's one baby step at a time because when life happens and life has

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happened to me this weekend, when life happens, I want to be able to know that I can keep moving forward regardless of what happened in in my life.

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And that's another thing that I got to see is that yes, emotionally I was a mess, but I still kept moving.

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I still did things that needed to get done that I didn't necessarily want to do, but I did them anyways because it was the only way I knew how to navigate through the intense emotion. And what

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happened is Marco was put down over the weekend because he had a blockage. And even though I spent time at the vet

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getting him unblocked and it was two times and Thursday he brought him home, he was all happy, everything was fine, he was his old self. And the next day he couldn't he didn't pee for 24 hours.

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That was tough to take him and put him down when he was a 2-year-old cat. So yeah, it was a

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little tough. It's still tough emotionally, but you know what? I'm moving forward. I'm still doing the things that need to get done. I don't

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feel overwhelmed. I don't feel like I need to have drugs or anything else to move through it. Now, maybe three or four months ago, that might have been a

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different story. I might have needed my glass of wine to just calm and feel, but I don't need that anymore. That's the

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power that I have gained by doing the permission slips, by putting my hand on my heart and saying, "Everything is okay and I'm perfectly fine right where I am at this moment.

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that makes a big difference.

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So, I invite you to check out those permission slips because they really are a gift that I'm

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giving you. It's something that I've I just came up with and I just love it because how many times do we feel like we need permission to just be who we are and we don't.

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So, this isn't a meditation and you don't need to be anywhere quiet to do

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it. And if you close your eyes, you can. I mean, if you can close your eyes, go for it. If you're dry driving

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or doing dishes or your hands are busy, just stay with my voice because that's enough.

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So right now, without changing anything, just notice where you're holding tension.

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Maybe it's your jaw.

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Maybe it's your shoulders up near your ears. You don't have to fix it.

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Just notice it.

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Now I want you to say either out loud or in your head, I am allowed to stop for five .

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Nothing will fall apart. Say it again.

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I am allowed to stop for five . Nothing will fall apart.

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Let your shoulders drop half an inch.

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And take one slow breath in through your nose.

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And let it out slower than it came in.

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That longer exhale is a direct signal to your nervous system that you are safe right now.

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In this exact moment, you don't need the whole day off.

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You just proved to your body that 5  of stopping didn't hurt you.

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That's the whole practice. That's how trust gets rebuilt.

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5  minutes at a time.

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If this episode names something you've been carrying alone, that's is exactly the work we go deeper into inside the I am the light sanctuary.

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It's where this five-minute practice becomes a real supported rhythm. Not one more thing you're going to do alone. I

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am offering a 7-day free trial and there's no pressure. Just come in, look around, and see if this feels like somewhere your nervous system doesn't have to perform.

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The link will be in the show notes, and it's at school.com/iamthelight sanctuary slabout.

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I will see you Friday for your permission slip. And I'll see you right back here next Tuesday at 400 PM Eastern

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Standard Time. This is Kathleen Flanagan and you don't have to carry this alone.