What burning out as a teacher taught me about rest.

I remember a colleague commenting on my massive sigh of stress as the bell went and I was setting up exam papers at the start of a lesson I was late for, having run across the site to try and avoid being late.

I hadn't even been aware of that sigh.

I wasn't aware that meant my body was trying to regulate its stress.

I wasn't aware of everything that I was holding and just how damn HEAVY that felt.

I would have resisted anyone telling me I needed to do anything differently.

I'd have said: you don't understand. This is the way it has to be. This is the demands of my teaching job.

SOME MANY of us live like this, right?

We survive, we don't thrive.

We get through the day.

We say, life or work is just so busy right now.

I've been absolutely slammed at work.

I've barely had a chance to do anything besides sleep and grab some food.

We end up not sleeping.

Living with high anxiety.

With bad/stuck/irritable bowels.

Brain fog.

Feeling trapped.

Since that day in the classroom (over 8 years ago now!), I've talked about rest a lot. The importance of rest. How to rest. Our relationship to rest.

Because can we truly be healthy if we aren't rested?

And, even until recently, I still hadn't been aware of WHY rest has become such a crisis in our society.

I had no idea of the structures sent up in our culture and countries that make rest so unavailable and/or difficult for us

I was exhausted. And you're exhausted right now.

And we're exhausted because we're being asked to carry a weight that was never ours to carry.

I wish someone could have gently shown me that there is another way, and that by sprinting down this treadmill of achievement and productivity, as a young teacher trying to emulate my mentors and be just good enough...

I wish there HAD been someone there to gently show me just how out of balance I was. I wish someone could have explained exactly what this cycle is that I was trapped in, and helped me see the bigger picture, and why I felt like I was failing all the time at this.

Hello, it's me.

I'm going to break this down for you.

Catch the replay of my 'Rest' workshop where we dive into exactly why we're living emotionally exhausted.

This is a masterclass to step into the relaxed women you want to be.

Then, we 'll use meditation, somatics, breathwork and tapping for emotional release to down-regulate and access deep rest (and if you want way more of this and to go deeper, then check out Home, starting really soon in September).

Catch the replay for free here.