Cliff notes version: Prioritizing rest is the embodiment of a more-than-enough life. Are you giving yourself the rest you need? 

What is rest, anyway?

Is it naps? Is it not doing anything? Is it retiring from life? Is it healing from an injury? Is it only allowed during total exhaustion?

Let’s make sure we are working with the same definition of rest.

1. the refreshing quiet or repose of sleep:

2. refreshing ease or inactivity after exertion or labor:

3. relief or freedom, especially from anything that wearies, troubles, or disturbs.

For sure, rest is a regenerative pathway to being the human you wish to be.

What I hear most often is “I’m so tired.”

If a woman isn’t actively tired, she is likely wired and amped up, totally in the “busy zone” that our culture absolutely loves.

Neither of these states (tired or wires, or tired and wired) supports our highest vision, our best work, or our best decisions....

Have you had those persistent nudges?

Do you remember when you were a kid and you were missing a tooth and you just couldn't keep your tongue out of the space where the tooth once was, no matter how hard you tried to just leave it be?

Well, I have been prodded and nudged relentlessly by ideas and issues in that same way throughout my life -- my thoughts straying back over and over again to an idea that just would not leave me alone. Like the proverbial tongue probing the gum. 

The ideas that nudge me endlessly are usually things that scare the living shit out of me: getting sober back in my 20's, having a child, training to become a coach, starting a coaching business, living in Africa, pursuing a master's degree in my 40's FFS... the list goes on. I've been resistant and argumentative with most of the big decisions I've made in my life but in the end, I've never been sorry when I've said yes to those persistent nudges. 

I believe most, if not all of...

Self-responsibility is powerful medicine.

At the same time, the general insistence (especially in the spiritual, healing, and personal development realm) that personal challenge = being stuck in a story is frankly, complete bullshit. It draws the attention away from what is truly being offered to you via your experience and instead, adds insult to injury via the subtle judgment that you are “stuck in a story”.

Seriously, though — isn’t it interesting that we never consider ourselves to be “stuck in a story” if it makes us feel good? If it bolsters our sense of confidence? If it brings us a sense of clarity about who we are and how the world works?

You can try and gloss over, ignore, or positive affirmation your way past the very real conditions of life that create confusion, uncertainty, and hurts of the present and the past all day long but stories: our individual and collective stories (and the sorrow, grief, anger, fear, shame, and guilt that...