Deep Rest Meditation | Nervous System Reset for Burnout & Exhaustion

Welcome. This is a somatic meditation for helping to put the weight down of all the things that we carry every day and learning to use rest as a mechanism for finding the growth and expansion that we want in our lives. If you're able to, I encourage you to lie down for this one, or otherwise find whatever position asks the least of you. Give yourself time to really sink in and find comfort. Maybe even a little more time than you normally would. Let your eyes close when you're ready. And take a deep breath in. Letting the exhale fall out naturally. Let's do that again, inhaling, finding rest, and exhaling. Letting go of any stresses as they're ready to fall away. Keep following that breath pattern, bringing in what feels restful, and letting go of anything that feels stressful. Notice how you are feeling when you got here. For a lot of people, there's a small negotiation before anything like this happens in the day. A quick scan of what's still outstanding or case that has to be made for why 20 minutes is allowed. If some version of that happened on your way here, it's worth noticing. Because it tells you the terms that you've been living on. There's a kind of tiredness that sleep doesn't touch. For most people who are looking for a meditation about rest, already know it well. It's the tiredness of never being properly off duty. You can sleep for 8 hours and wake with a distinct sense that something carried on running all night because it probably did. But here's what I want to say before we go anywhere else. You didn't become someone who struggles to stop because you lack discipline. It's not a character flaw, wearing ambition as a disguise. Somewhere along the line, your body worked out that being useful was how you stayed safe. Perhaps stillness was when the difficult things tended to happen. Your being needed was what kept you in the room or there was simply nobody else coming. So stopping was never one of the options on the menu. Your system took that in and built a rule out of it that rest costs more than it gives back, so keep moving. It's been running that rule faithfully ever since. Long past the conditions that made it sensible, and it's been trying to protect you the whole time. The other thing worth knowing is that rest isn't the pause in the work. It's where the work actually happens sometimes. Tissue repair, immune regulation, the clearing your brain does overnight, the settling of everything you took in during the day. All of it runs once your system finally drops below a certain level of alert. A body held in mild readiness around the clock never quite gets down there, which is why pushing harder through exhaustion so rarely delivers what it seems to promise. You can't heal in the state you're trying to heal from. So none of this is time off from moving forward. Rest is actually the mechanism that gets you there. Feel the surface underneath you now, the bed, floor, the chair, wherever your body has ended up, and find the real points of contact. See if you can hand over a little more of your weight to that surface. Take a deep breath in, and as you let go of your exhale, I want you to look for where you're still working. Start at your jaw, and notice whether your back teeth are quietly touching. Let them come apart. Let your tongue drop away from the roof of your mouth. Letting go, and hinging the jaw, butting that release whatever it's been carrying in any small degree. Move to the space between your eyebrows, and let it be smooth and wide. Come to your eyes, and let them get heavy in their sockets, rather than held in position. First of us keep a low level of focus running, even behind closed lids, a readiness to look at something. You can let that go now. Feel the back of your neck, where the skull meets the spine. A great deal of vigilance lives in there, and it tends to show itself only when you invite it to stop. Come down to your shoulders. Most people find they're carrying them a little higher than necessary, holding a shape that was useful at some point today. Let them drop toward the floor, and go on dropping, past where you'd usually stop. Check your hands, if they're holding on to anything, including each other. Let the fingers open. Feel your belly, and let it be soft and unheld. There's nobody here to hold it in for. Notice your thighs, then your calves, your feet, which are often still slightly ready to take you somewhere. Every one of those is a small group of muscles that's been on duty. Nobody told you that they had to remain on duty. It accumulated quietly over the years. Now I want you to imagine cool water moving down through you, starting at the top of your head, not shocking or cold. Think of the temperature of a shaded room on a hot afternoon. Let it move slowly and let it take the heat out of whatever it passes through. Turn over your face, loosening the jaw on the way through your throat, across your shoulders, down both arms and out through your fingers. Before it meets something braced, let the water pool there for a while before it carries on. There's no hurry in this. On the places that take longest are usually the ones that have been holding on. Let it continue down through your chest and belly through your hips and pelvis along your legs and out through the soles of your feet, taking the heat of the day with it. If there's pain somewhere that won't soften, leave it alone rather than working on it. Cool water doesn't have to fix anything to be worth having nearby. Let the parts that can settle go ahead and settle and let the difficult place be attended to rather than argue with, which is usually the only thing that takes any edge off of it anyway. If water moving downward doesn't land for you, try the tide instead. Everything going out, unhurried, taking things with it as it goes, with no question anywhere about whether it comes back. Somewhere in the middle of you, there's still warmth and it belongs there. Most was never about going cold. Picture of fire rakes down for the night. The flames are gone and the coals are covered, holding everything they need, quiet and low, but completely intact. In the morning, it takes almost nothing to bring the fire back because it was kept rather than spent. So let your fire go low right now. There's nothing here that has to stay ready for. Everything is required of you, measured, and no parts of this gets assessed afterwards. See whether some part of you finds that difficult to accept. It's common when it's worth meeting kindly rather than arguing with. A system that's been on for years doesn't switch off because it's been given permission once. It takes grace, patience, and repetition with yourself, but you're showing that you already know how to carve out that time and what a beautiful place this is to learn to come back to over and over again. If restlessness comes up as you settle, or a sudden urge to get up and deal with one small thing, expect it rather than fighting it. Bodies that have been running on alertness often produce a burst of exactly that at the moment that they're asked to stop. The way a hand that's gripped something for hours will ache when it finally opens. Let the restlessness be there and stay lying down anyway. It passes on its own within a few minutes when nothing feeds it. If a list arrives while you're lying here, let it arrive, it will wait. It always has every single time, including the times it felt like it wouldn't. There's an idea that you have to fill your own cup before you can pour into anyone else's. It usually gets offered as a nice sentiment, but it's actually mechanical. What people receive from you when you're empty is your effort. To get the version of you that's managing, answering, maybe even physically present, while most of you with somewhere else doing sums about how long until you can sit down, or how long you can keep this up. What they receive when you're rested is you, the real you. And everybody can feel the difference, including the people who'd never mentioned it. The energy you give away has to come from somewhere. In the choice between it coming out of a reserve and coming directly out of you, the reserve that's built through rest is the one that leaves both of you intact. Rest was never something to be earned. Nobody earns the tide, or their heartbeat, or the fact that a cut closes over without being asked. Rest sits in this category. It's one of the conditions your body runs on, and asking it to prove that it deserves it is like asking it to justify needing water. Let that be true for the next few minutes, even if you plan to argue with it later. Breathe in, letting the rest sink in deeply, taking full advantage of this time. Take stock of what's different in you compared to when we started. Perhaps your breath has dropped lower, your face has softened, or your hands have let go. Maybe there's a heaviness through your back that wasn't available a few minutes ago. Whatever's there, that's your system, finding the state where repair happens. You didn't work for it. You stopped working and it arrived. Learn whether rest is permitted by watching whether the adults around them take any. Nobody ever says it out loud. A child raised alongside someone who's always doing grows into a nervous system that reads stillness as a risk and carries that into their twenties, relationships, and eventually their body, all while believing it's simply how they're made. If that's what you were handed, this is where you can allow it to stop. Every time you lie down without building a case for it first, someone younger is learning they're allowed to as well. And they'll never know the moment that they learned it. Stay here resting as long as you want to. If you're headed towards sleep, let this be the point where my voice drifts off. You can carry on without me. If you're coming back into your day, come back slowly, let some sound in, feel the air on your skin, then the weight of your body where it rests. Move your fingers and toes when you're ready. Let a fuller breath come in. Open your eyes on your own time. Whatever's waiting for you is still waiting. But now you'll meet it from somewhere better than you would have before the rest. Thank you so much for being here and resting and meditating with me. Namaste. (soft music) (soft music) (soft music) (soft music) (soft music)