Actualized Living W/ Erik

See? Okay, here we go. We are live Cadre family. I just tried to go live and it kind of shut off. So hopefully you can meet me here in this live session today. I know I've been trying to get the hang of the technology, so I hope everyone's doing well today. It's been a good day, but a long day. Ready to have some, some rest in my, my day today. If you're just tuning in, I want to fill you in on a few things I've released this week. Two videos came out in this past week. One was five reasons that I think we can move away from this medical model of what it means to be well in relation to our mental and emotional health.

If you haven't seen that yet, definitely go check it out and think about some ideas that come to mind. And then the other video is titled the Garden. And this is a picture I paint to describe where maybe wellness exists within our lives as people. And so those two videos are up on my page if you want to go check them out and just get a little bit of an idea of what we're talking about here. And so to follow up today, I think one thing that's vital to our wellness is rest. And rest is something that I think can be hard to come by and can mean a lot of different things to a lot of different people.

But when I think about rest and times when I found true rest in my life, it's when my mind kind of takes a backseat to my experience. And what I mean by that is rest is hard to come by when we're constantly seeking answers, solutions, thinking three steps ahead in our day to day lives, trying to predict, analyze, understand, wrestle with. And so as we're seeking for rest, and I know it's something that I'm going to really be seeking after this weekend, there's almost a paradox to it, because in order to find rest, we have to let go of the things that keep us from being at rest.

And sometimes that can be even the pursuit of rest itself. What things do we allow to be enough to stop and take a breath? And so this week, I want to bring to you some ideas of ways that you can find rest, and just a quick kind of step by step thing we can do to help us get to a place where maybe a little bit of rest can be found. And the first thing that we're going to do is think of what we can observe, what we can see in ourselves. That's becoming a barrier to rest this week, what are these walls that we build up between us and having a break from what can be exhausting.

And one way we observe is think about the ways in which we're telling ourselves we have to, we can't, we must, we should. Before what? For example, for me, sometimes I fall a little bit behind on, like, paperwork. And so maybe it's late at night and I've already had a full day of work and. But before I give myself a break from ruminating about the day, I say, oh, I have to finish this thing up. And at times, that may be a useful thing. But if our goal, if our value is rest, here, we can acknowledge the language we're using to define what we do in our life, the choices we make.

So once we realize that, okay, maybe I don't have to, maybe that's a thought, an idea, we take a step back and we slow down a bit, and this is where we kind of break that stream of thought. A mindfulness activity. If you were with me last week we practiced one, and this week we'll practice one again. And this week, the restful mindfulness activity we're going to do is just within our breath. And so if you'll join me in just closing our eyes and taking a deep breath, I like to start this time especially in pursuit of rest, with a statement of even though I'm blank, I can still blank.

So for me, even though I'm overwhelmed, I can still rest. Even though life feels out of control, I can be still. And now, as we get to this place, what I'm going to encourage you to do is a breath focused mindfulness activity where we're going to breathe in and fill our lungs all the way up. And once we feel like there's no more extra room for air, we're going to take another sip of air and then slowly exhale. And as we do this, we're going to grab ahold of our attention and focus it on our breath.

And maybe as you do that, thoughts, things come back into your frame of mind. And we don't have to fight them or resist them. We can just look at them and then come back to our breath. And now, as we've done that and we're here and we've created some space between these places, our mind tells us we have to be. What's one action you can take that reinforces your need for rest? Like, maybe for me, it's laying down and listening to some music, getting lost in the sounds of songs that I enjoy. Or maybe it's giving yourself 30 minutes to creatively express yourself, whatever that thing may be.

Even though you're stressed, overwhelmed, scared, anxious, uncertain, you can still rest. Have a great weekend, and I look forward to connecting with you here again next week. Thank you for coming.