You're Allowed to Stop Pushing: Recovery Starts with a Pause

And I want to just start by saying, I'm not saying that all pushing is bad.

In fact, effort is really, really helpful and we need to be able to put effort into things to make things happen.

But the nuance in this chat or this conversation I'm having with you today is that It's about not pushing perpetually because what happens when we just continue to push and to push and to put effort in, put effort in? It's like our focus is down like this.

And we might get up, lift our heads up in five years time, five years of efforting and be like, how did I find myself here? And so that's what we're exploring.

Like, here's what happens when we start to understand things in a way or to do life in a way where it's not just constant efforting, where we're able to have pauses and So I think we see this and we experience this so much, particularly as women, because a woman's body is not designed for perpetual production.

Like imagine if we never had any break between having babies, like ever.

Even the idea of it kind of makes me feel ill.

Like nothing in nature is designed to be perpetually producing.

Everything has periods of being fallow, of having a pause.

And that's actually when we receive kind of nourishment.

That's when the nourishment comes in.

This idea of perpetual effort, there's a reason why we have that in our psyches.

And I'm gonna get into that in just a sec.

There's a couple of schools of thought about how it is or why it is that we came to kind of be in this state of perpetual production.

Clark Strand talks about it in one of his books.

He talks about when electricity and light came into play, how it kind of started to sustain this lifestyle that wasn't in sync with nature.

You also see it in agriculture, in the Industrial Revolution and in agriculture, where it's about just more like basically asking that the land continually produce Or in the Industrial Revolution, I think it was Oliver Berkman that he was talking about how we used to live kind of in sync with the seasons and with the land.

And then when the Industrial Revolution came in and we had shift work, there was no longer these Sundays.

There was no longer this day where everyone rested together.

With shift work, you know, you had families kind of being separated and not getting that time because they needed to keep the machines going seven days a week.

And sometimes like when I share stuff like that, I'm going to just pause and invite you to be curious about what you notice when you think about that, when you think about this shift work, when you think about and when you be with what it's like.

to be constantly producing a bit.

Like I said just a few moments ago about imagine that a woman's body through her whole life was perpetually fertile.

Like how does it make you feel to think of it that way? And this is why there's this invitation to stop pushing and see what happens when you do.