Rest feels impossible... because you think of yourself as an "individual" ??

Hi community,

Through my experiences?coaching, facilitating, and teaching people how?to feel safe enough to slow down, I've had the privilege of helping people confront?internalized oppression, heal intergenerational cycles contributing to burnout, and?rewrite beliefs and inherited stories?about rest.?

I treasure that this is my calling because I?get to witness folks?doing?courageous, vulnerable, and sacred work in community. Redemption is the stuff of warriors!?

The role I play offers me a?unique vantage point that few have access to. Given an up close and personal view into people's relationship to work, survival, and rest, I?get to?study common struggles, notice patterns, and?track what works.

Which leads me to what I want to share with you, something that causes almost everyone on the rest journey to ram?into the same wall again and again: One?of the most persistent and?insidious beliefs you'll have to confront to experience the restfulness you long for?is the myth?that you are an individual.?

Before we jump in, let's set the foundation first.

What it costs us to survive

If you've attended a Community Rest Session , Collective Rest @ Work session, or a workshop of mine, you'll know that I often teach about the cultural erasure of rest and how the hidden costs of surviving waves around all of this is that we are effectively disabled in our decision-making without even realizing we are.

As human beings, we have access to four innate forms of intelligence AKA ways of knowing and making sense of our experience:

• Mind: Logic, problem-solving, cognition, ego
• Body: Your ability to feel, sense, intuit, and gather?insights and intelligence beneath the surface of your skin
• Heart: Your capacity to love and care for those you know and those you don't know, your desire to be part of something greater than yourself, your biological need to connect with others
• Soul: Your purpose, capacity to dream and imagine beyond what we've known, your essence or higher/true self

But if you’re constantly busy, distracted, and overstimulated, you won't have the time, space, or even desire to check in with yourself.?

Checking in with yourself begins to feel frivolous, silly, a waste of time. What's the point? Look at all there is to do, run around for, chase. Or worse, you might assume that you already know what you're feeling and need and that?you can discern that without actually slowing down to check in. (We sure can be arrogant, can't we?!)

Here's the thing: If you're not slowing down to check in with yourself, you won't know what you need when you need it.?Moving fast and hustling hard?de-sensitizes you to your inner world as you prioritize orienting towards your outer world (which has a lot of not-so-helpful things to say about what you need in service of spinning the wheels of capitalism).

Over time, you will lose what I?like to call body language fluency. This is your?ability to notice, understand, and translate the language of your inner world – which communicates via?physical sensations, emotions, desires, resistance, breath, intuition, and thoughts – into?what you are really feeling and what you need. This is your ability to gather very important?data and insights about you and how the environment is affecting you from your body, heart, and soul.

Illiterate in body language fluency,?you’ll mistrust your body's cues, feel unsafe inside of this "uncontrollably unruly"?body,?and look for answers outside of yourself.?

Disconnected from body, heart, and soul, you are effectively disabled in your decision-making because 1) you're overvaluing your fallible?mind, 2) you're using your mind to?? dominate or overpower your body, heart, and soul, and?3)?you're not utilizing all the features of this?inner compass?of sorts?available to you.

The insidiousness of individuality

First of all, it's simply untrue that we exist as individuals.?In your gut biome alone, you harbor 10-100 trillion bacteria .?

That last creative idea you had??Where did it come from? Can you genuinely say it's "yours" alone if you're a compilation of every being you've come across, every book or podcast you've taken in, every ancestor that came before you?

Which farms delivered the produce in your fridge to your grocery store or farmer's market where you purchased it? Who generates the oxygen in the air?so that you can breathe? How did you form your beliefs about the world?

Our entire existence as human beings is made possible through and in relationship.Yet the myth of the individual rational actor, which has roots in?the racist ideologies from the Enlightenment period coinciding with the expansion of Western European colonialism, still runs rampant?in our collective consciousness, wreaking havoc and stirring up confusion.

See, you've been trained to place your mind on a pedestal. The creation of this false hierarchy also trained you?to look down upon your body, heart, and soul. Cut off from 3 out of 4 of your innate forms of intelligence, your mind was?then fed stories that you are an individual, a narrative that has led to a loneliness epidemic , increased rates of mental illness, and other social ailments.?

Convinced of your individuality and?tricked into operating?from mind supremacy, you see?little purpose or value in slowing down to check in.?Which conveniently?benefits the status quo because of the 4 innate forms of intelligence, your mind is the easiest to trick, manipulate, lie to, and poison. Your body, heart, and soul though? They are the truthtellers. They have great bullshit radars.

Do you see why these systems of unrest do NOT want you connecting these dots or being in right relationship to yourself?

Here's what I'd like to offer: Stop thinking of yourself as an individual or assuming you already know what you need. Start seeing yourself as a collaboration, a team with many players who are ALL valuable and important!

You wouldn't imagine starting a team meeting with more than half of the team missing, right? That wouldn't be fair and it certainly won't bode well for your goals or projects.

So let's invite our bodies, hearts, and souls to the conversation and restore them to their rightful place: alongside, not beneath, the mind. This is how we slowly but surely decolonize and get free.

Your Restie Bestie,

Cassandra Lam /?Lam Thùy Dung

Founder of Collective Rest

Register for the Replay

REST IN CRISIS & CHANGE

After hosting an earlier iteration of this workshop in February and testing out an in-person version with some clients,?I'm excited to bring an improved and longer version of this workshop to the community!

In this free live 2-hour virtual workshop, we will:

• Unpack the hidden creative potential in the etymology of “crisis”
• Destabilize Western notions of “peace” that limit our understanding of rest while perpetuating violence on people and the planet
• Orient towards liberatory rest to address personal & political unrest
• Learn a practical somatic exercise to decolonize how you relate to your mind, body, heart, and soul

?? I'm in! ??

Community Rest Sessions

INTO THE VOID

This month’s Community Rest Session invites you to establish a conscious, humble, and reverent relationship with the unknown.?

We’ll journey into the void not in search of ways to feed our addiction to knowing, but with a willingness to get quiet, listen deeply, and remember that we are eternally wrapped in the unknown’s embrace.?

Perhaps by welcoming, rather than demanding answers or explanations from, the void, we can learn to navigate the unknown facing us as a collective with clear eyes and an open heart.

?? I'm in! ??

Community Storytelling Event

Collective?(Un)rest:?Unshaming Our Stories of Survival

Join me for a special community storytelling event centering our collective unrest!?Come with your video on or off, willing to share or just to listen, anonymous or as yourself!

Many people begin their rest journey in earnest during a difficult period in their lives. Something startling happens – maybe a health scare or injury, a mental health or spiritual crisis, loss of a loved one or a job – and the magnitude of disruption overwhelms their ability to deny the truth any longer.

Worn down, they can no longer maintain the exhausting performance of success that exchanged their long-term wellbeing for a very short-lived sense of security. Nor can they downplay the costs of operating in boom-and-bust cycles of burnout. It is at this vulnerable and sacred juncture that they finally surrender to something they’ve known deep down inside: they cannot go on living like this. Even so, starting the rest journey is not easy. In the beginning, the temptation to “just go back to how things were” is strongest. We might feel like all we have are unrest stories. Meanwhile, we’re suffering in silence without access to people who understand or to be in the struggle with. So let us?gather to share stories of how we overcame, endured, and survived. We will unburden ourselves of shame, blame, and guilt towards our relationship to rest (or lack thereof).?We will honor, listen to, and compost our unrest stories, recognizing the seeds of a new rest story lies within.

?? I'm in! ??

If you value these free community offerings, will you help me sustain this space?

I am committed to offering virtual rest-affirming spaces?free of charge as long as it's sustainable to do so because it's important to acknowledge how systems of oppression — namely racism, capitalism, colonialism, patriarchy, and ableism — inequitably distribute the conditions and resources to feel safe enough to take rest.?

At the same time, it's important that I preserve my ability to do this work long-term.

This is where community comes in. It's up to US to protect the spaces we value, especially spaces that are publicly countercultural and liberation-focused!

Support Collective Rest by:

1. Inviting a friend to a future Community Rest Session OR
2. Forwarding my newsletter to someone who could use it OR
3. Referring your employer or team to book Collective Rest @ Work OR
4. Signing up for a 1:1 Rest Mentorship session with me OR
5. Becoming a member of the Collective Rest Patreon where you can access audio-only practices?OR
6. [For Asian & Pacific Islander women & femmes] Enrolling in the Fall 2024 cohort of Rewriting Our Rest Stories , my rest program for us to break intergenerational cycles of burnout in community through rest

Thank you for your support!

P.S. If you'd like to share anything (feedback, questions, ideas, anecdotes), please don't hesitate to hit reply. ??

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