There’s an internet meme that I come back to over and over again. It’s an illustration that shows what we think showing up looks like and what it actually means.
“Just show up,” is a mantra that I’ve used to lower the bar for everything from exercise to getting myself to photo shoots to sharing my work publicly. When I consider simply showing up to be the win, the hardest part of the whole experience, it reminds me that I can trust myself to improvise and figure things out one moment at a time once I arrive and am present.
But for the past two weeks, I couldn’t even show up. I’d sit down to write and could not focus, no matter how many times I tried or hours spent staring at a blank screen.
It probably didn’t help that I was feeling anxious and tired. Or that in the midst of traveling over the past three months, my morning pages practice became inconsistent. Or that my long-term relationship with my business coach ended somewhere in there too. Or that I relaxed some of my boundaries around checking social media while spending time in airports. Or that I couldn’t find any books that would hold my attention. And maybe those are all reasons that my creative channel refused to commune with me.
One of the gifts of spending a lot of the past three years in a version of solitude was discovering what daily practices support my ability to process and share ideas. It helped me get comfortable with being alone and in the quiet, I could hear myself and my inner voice. And although I was flirting with that path even before being firmly directed toward it, that push helped me meet a new version of myself: my writer self.
Of my three creative selves (my photographer, yoga, and writer selves), my writer self is the most sensitive and inward-focused. She needs a lot of time to explore and follow her curiosity, read, make mental connections, and take both active and passive rest. So much rest. An annoying amount of rest.
I’m trying not to find it annoying. The only reason it feels annoying is because I have stories about rest being shameful. Lazy. That doing nothing is one of the seven deadly sins. That most problems can be solved by DOING something about them, because doing silences some of the discomfort. There are stories that healing requires work, and it does, but not out of proportion to rest. That productivity is the measure of human worth. The doing and the pushing and the overpreparing feel easy and familiar because that’s how I learned to cope with life feeling out of control. Chasing the favor of the algorithms over the past decade has also trained us that we need to be consistently available and visible in order to stay at the forefront of everyone’s mind.
But as I’ve spent more time teaching yoga and creating with my yoga self, I’m beginning to see how important rest and pulling my attention back into myself is…and how it serves a purpose. Rest might look like doing nothing, but there’s so much happening beneath the surface. There is deep healing power in what looks like doing nothing. It’s a power that should be afforded inherently to all beings, without judgement or privilege; one that is deserved and not earned.
I teach restorative yoga at a gym that offers conditioning (cardio) and strength classes. Classes that require putting in effort. They are wonderful and they feel good in their own way, just like productivity does. But it feels so much harder for people to accept the invitation to rest and restore. When the cultural stories that we have and uphold put more emphasis on producing and expending energy – and require that for survival or even finding access to guided rest – it’s easy to lose sight of and feel ashamed for, or even just put off, taking time and space to regenerate.
The regenerative space I’m trying to create in yoga looks like time for connecting with the body. We bring our attention into ourselves by following our breath. And then we start the practice by simply breathing, longer and slower, which looks a whole lot like lying on the floor doing nothing. It’s anything but. Breathing slowly and fully allows the body to regulate. Restoration begins with regulation, which is another way of saying giving the body the attention and presence it needs to feel safe. Breathing isn’t productive; it’s absolutely necessary. Only after we take inventory of ourselves do we start moving slowly and intentionally, making shapes and holding them until the body begins to release the tension it’s holding,
All of the practices I started during the pandemic – the ones that let me draw into myself, that might look like procrastination, taking a break or even spending a lot of time doing things that feel pleasurable – are necessary to be able to produce. It’s a cycle, so there is no clear place it begins or ends, but there is always an ebb and flow between producing and restoring, doing and resting. I value the consistency of my writing practice, but also honor my need to step away when I feel the signals that it’s time to refill the creative well. Noticing what rituals and practices give me energy and which ones use energy and where I’m at in the cycle is part of creating in a sustainable way.
Sometimes showing up looks like honoring the parts of ourselves that need restoration.