Dearest you,

I want to ask you something, and I want you to sit with it rather than answer quickly.

When did you last stop? Not because you were sick. Not because you had no choice. But because you decided, with full agency, that you were worth stopping for.

For most of the women I work with, that question lands in a complicated place. Because many of us were taught — through word, through example, through the thousand daily messages of our lives — that rest is something you earn. That stopping is laziness. That the measure of a good woman is how much she gives.

Today I want to offer you a different framework entirely.

Rest is not a reward for enough. Rest is a requirement for being human. And for women who have been surviving, it is the most radical act of love — for yourself, and for everyone around you.

What actually happens when you don't rest

The nervous system that runs on empty does not simply produce less. It produces differently. Threat responses heighten. Patience shortens. The capacity for attunement — for genuinely feeling what another person needs — diminishes. You may still be showing up. You may still be doing all the things. But you are doing them from a state of depletion, which means the quality of your presence is reduced.

For women who have lived with trauma or chronic stress, this is compounded. The nervous system has learned to treat rest itself as a risk. It does not know how to switch off because switching off once meant danger. So the body keeps running. Keeps scanning. Keeps bracing.

This is not a character flaw. It is a survival adaptation. And it can be unlearned.

What rebooting actually looks like

A reboot is not a week in Bali, although that would be lovely. A reboot is any period of intentional non-doing long enough for your nervous system to exhale.

Here is what the research on nervous system regulation tells us: it takes approximately 20 minutes of genuine relaxation for the body to begin shifting from sympathetic (alert, doing, scanning) to parasympathetic (resting, digesting, integrating) states. Twenty minutes. Most of us do not give ourselves twenty uninterrupted minutes in a day.

So let's start there.

1

Give yourself 20 minutes today. Phone in another room. No task. Sit, walk slowly, lie down. Just breathe.

2

Notice what arises when you stop. Guilt? Restlessness? That discomfort is information — it shows you where the work is.

3

Say this to yourself: 'When I am rested, I am more present. More present means more connected. More connected means more love.' Rest is not selfish. It is the precondition for generosity.

The women in your life are watching

One of the most powerful things I have witnessed in my workshops is this: when one woman gives herself permission to rest, another woman sees it and remembers that she can too. We learn what is possible from each other.

If you are a mother, your children are watching. If you are a friend, your friends are watching. If you are in any caring role at all — and most women are — the people around you are learning from you what it means to be a woman in the world.

When you rest, you are not abandoning them. You are showing them that they are allowed to rest too. You are modelling self-respect. You are breaking a generational pattern that has kept women depleted for too long.

The most generous version of you lives on the other side of rest. She is clearer, warmer, more patient, more creative, and more capable of real love. She needs you to stop.

The body work that makes it possible

For women whose nervous systems have been shaped by trauma, rest does not always come from willpower. Sometimes you need to teach the body — gently, repeatedly — that stopping is safe.

This is exactly what somatic practice, breathwork and clinical hypnotherapy do. They work with the nervous system directly, creating new experiences of safety in the body. Not through thinking. Through sensation, breath, movement and guided presence.

This is the foundation of everything I do in the Reclaiming Wholeness workshops and online programs. And it is available to you, starting now, from wherever you are.

Coming up

The May Women's Movement Workshop — Tuesdays 12–3pm, 26 May to 16 June, North Fremantle Community Centre — is open and filling. This is four weeks of the very work we have been talking about: somatic clearing, breathwork, movement and embodied story. Small group. Safe container.

If rest feels hard for you alone, come and do it with others. Something shifts when women rest together.

Women's Movement and Choreography 4-week Workshop

https://events.humanitix.com/women-s-life-choreography-4-week-workshop-26th-may-16th-june-2026

26th May - 16th June 2026

Tuesdays 12pm - 3pm