When you’re healing, whether physically or emotionally or mentally, your body needs extra rest.

Hi, I’m Nicole C. Ayers, and I wanna talk about the power of rest when you’re making peace with your body. If you have a physical injury that you need to recover from, or if you have had one, then you know your body is going to need extra time to rest. Although it catches us by surprise sometimes just how much rest we actually need. What we aren’t thinking about or giving enough attention to is all that’s happening underneath our skin, behind the scenes, if you will.

Our body is doing some complex and really miraculous work to heal itself, to stitch the wound back together, to heal that injury or, or whatever it is that you’re recovering from.

The same is true when we are healing emotional wounds, whether we are relearning ways to be in relationship with our bodies, or we are trying to rewire our nervous systems, or we are just trying to offer some compassion and heal wounds we might have around our bodies.

And by wounds, I mean not physical ones, but those emotional, mental, spiritual wounds we might be carrying. If you start doing this work to make peace with your body, you might find that you’re tired. More than usual. It doesn’t mean anything’s wrong with you. It just means that there is a lot going on inside and you need to give yourself extra rest.

Maybe that looks like a power nap or going to bed earlier than you’re usually going to bed. What happens when we are actually resting, and by resting I mean physically sleeping sometimes, we’re letting ourselves recalibrate.

And I can’t prove this, but I think some really cool stuff is happening when we sleep. I think our body is able to really be in a such a state of deep relaxation that it is doing some really essential, necessary, amazing healing.

So whether you find yourself with a physical wound that needs tending or you are tending to your heart, to that relationship with your body, give yourself some extra rest if you find yourself in a hard spot.

There’s nothing wrong with you. You just need to offer yourself some nurturing, tender, kindness, the same way that you would encourage your loved one to rest and recover.