What it Truly Means to Rest & How it Activates Your Higher Reality

In today's episode, we talk all about:

1. What people think rest is & how those things are actually really unhelpful in the pursuit of relaxation,
2. What rest actually is,
3. The HUGE roll rest plays in our pursuit of sustainability & balance physically, mentally/emotionally & energetically, &
4. Why it’s so important that we make time for true rest on a regular basis & how it activates the law of attraction so you can more easily flow into your higher self.

Thank you so much for tuning in! If you loved this episode, you'll also love episode 10: Be Balance, My Love. 
Make sure you subscribe & share this podcast to stay up to date with the latest episodes, & click the LinkTree to Join the Email List & See My Current Coaching Offerings. 
See you soon, my love!
XoXo
Lauren

Transcript

Lauren (00:00.664)
Hello my loves, and welcome back to another episode of Native Growth Podcast. Listen, you are here to experience life. Not the rat race, not just good enough. You are here to experience love, joy, fulfillment, abundance, life. That life. This podcast is all about clearing the mental clutter and outdated beliefs that get in the way of that life and creating each day with intention and connection to your Native self.

Let's get started today. Okay, so I had this experience just a couple of days ago as these podcasts are, you know, typically thought up about. But also, since I had this experience a couple of days ago, it has come up several times in the last couple of days. So I felt really called today to talk about rest. We're gonna talk about what people think rest is and how the things that...

people think they are actually really unhelpful in the pursuit of relaxation and restoration physically, mentally, and energetically. We're going to bring awareness to how quickly life derails when we don't get intentional rest, proper rest, and then we will transition into what intentional proper rest actually looks like, what it really is, and why it's so important to make time for rest, real rest, on a regular

basis, not just physically and mentally, but also because it activates the law of attraction for us and helps us to flow into our next level higher self and into our next level higher reality, higher timeline. So there's a whole very holistic reality that comes along with rest that I am just, I'm just so happy and honored to be here sharing with you today.

So when we think about rest, I think the first thing that a lot of people automatically go to, maybe not necessarily in your thought process, maybe you think rest, you think sleep. Sleep is definitely, absolutely a big part, obviously, of our physical, mental, emotional, spiritual health, energetic health. But what I mean is that you, so you people, right, they go to work all day.

Lauren (02:27.256)
And then they go home and they think that their version of rest is zoning out. They think it's unplugging, right? So they turn on the TV and they just bend to watch. They get out their phone and they just doom scroll, right? So these things that we're doing in the pursuit of actually unplugging or disconnecting from work or whatever it is that we've been doing all day, right? That's actually not.

helpful at all. And I'm sure even just by talking about it in that sense, you can be like, yeah, like when I, when I spend all my time doing that, I still go to bed at the end of the night feeling like I haven't really accomplished anything. Like you can already bring awareness to the fact that I mean, you are zoning out, you're unplugging from work, you're unplugging from whatever it was you were doing before or whatever it was you were doing all day, but it doesn't -

really make you feel better, right? In the long term, even after a few hours have gone by that you've been unplugging, it still doesn't really make you feel better, right? And I think that the real problem is not so much in the act of watching TV itself, it's not so much in the act of scrolling on your phone itself, it's that we have no intention or awareness around what we're consuming or for how long. We have...

No real connection to the feeling in our body or the feeling in our brain of like, okay, I've been doing this long enough now that I do feel like I've disconnected and gotten some space from work, from whatever I was doing all day. Now that I'm effectively disconnected and unplugged, now I can go on to the next thing, right? We just have this mindless dopamine fix that just goes completely unregulated.

and at best becomes a habit, at worst becomes an addiction, right? And so while this is happening, we're completely unaware of the fact that we only have so many hours in a day. And if we're spending all that time quote -unquote unplugging, inherently we're not spending that time actually refilling our cup. We're not spending that time and that energy doing what is actually going to bring us back to a place of

Lauren (04:52.984)
mental, emotional, energetic homeostasis or baseline, right? So again, you're going to bed at the end of the night still feeling just completely exhausted, completely drained. All of the energy that you gave at work, the energy that you gave to the things that you had to get done during the day are all gone. And then you spent the rest of the time draining the heaviness from doing those things out of your system and never filling yourself back up, right? So if...

if unplugging is what we would consider our rest time quote unquote, right, then it's not really our rest time. On the other hand, there are certainly also a very large population of people where unplugging quote unquote has nothing to do with it, right, and it's actually more the opposite case that a lot of people just completely overfill.

their schedules, they've got places to be, they've got meetings to go to, they've got people to meet with, right? And in that case, it's also just that they're never really slowing down. Again, they're not getting rest either. So, you know, I feel like this episode is very much geared towards the dichotomy of those two groups of people. We have the people that are like, I'll...

I'll just go home and zone out and then we have the people that are like, yeah, I'll sleep when I'm dead, you know? But in both cases, the real challenge, the real energetic problem here is that we're not getting a balance between masculine and feminine energies. We're not balancing our giving with our receiving. We're not balancing our provider.

aspect with our recipient aspect, right? It's just in any case it's geared very much towards primarily that masculine energy of, well, I just need to go, I just need to hustle, I just need to provide, I just need to make money, I just need to, need to, need to, right? Which is that that need to do x, y, and z is...

Lauren (07:08.568)
not so much the masculine energy as much as it is just the survivalist energy, right? So between the survivalist energy and the that, you know, provider masculine energy of I have to provide, I have to bring home the bacon, I have to, you know, be the one to suffer and hustle to make the money to take care, right? Which is not inherently a bad thing. Again, it's only that we tend to do these things in

excess and then we're not finding the balance. So then when do we get past the survivalist and get into comfort and when do we get, when do we feel like we've given enough that we can now be on the receiving end? And how do we, you know, come to a place where we bring awareness and recognition to the fact that the

the less balance we have, the more we keep pushing ourselves, the more that pushing yourself actually becomes more like dragging yourself along, the less intentional that we become in just our normal everyday goings on, right? And the more that things start to feel forced and the more that we start to do them from a place of obligation, we're just trying to get shit done at a certain point.

instead of coming at them from the place of that wholeness that we have when we are well rested, when our cup is full, when we're restored, right? And coming from that place of love, even in the little things that we do every day, because we know that we can do them with intention, that we can put intentions into them, and we know...

inherently that doing all of these things adds up to the bigger picture of not only what we need to do but of the life that we desire to create as we go along doing those things one at a time and stacking them up and building that life that we desire, right? I mean think about, for example, this is something I've seen a lot and I know I've done it too.

Lauren (09:29.944)
when I used to work in early childhood and I would have seasons of life where I was hustling way too much and I was taking on way more responsibility than I should have both at work and at home at the time. You know, and I certainly got to a place where I would go to work and of course my job is early childhood so I should have this softer, feminine, you know, maternal type energy.

interactions going on, but you know when you've just been pushing too hard and not filling your cup back up and not getting that intentional rest, you do things like kids come up to you and they want to talk and you just you don't want to talk, you blow them off. You're just like, no, I'm not, I'm not doing that right now. They ask you to do things. No, we can't do that right now. can I go do art? No, that's just going to make way too much of a mess. you know, can I just go?

drink this cup of water. Well, you need to do it from a sippy cup because I don't feel like cleaning right now. You know, like we just we start to get that way where the the stress and the exhaustion builds up too much that we start projecting it onto people and things in our lives that had nothing to do with our own choice to not

insert rest sooner and more frequently, right, in order for us to find the balance that we should have found before we got to that point, right? Even in the way that you talk to yourself when you've been pushing too hard, when you've been dragging yourself along, when you're too exhausted, I find definitely for myself, and I know it's been the case for a lot of clients I've worked with as well, especially

especially because a lot of clients start working with me and they're like, this is a big part of what has been really challenging for them. It's a big part of why they feel like they're living the same day on repeat because they're not getting intentional rest and making more time for themselves in their own care, right? And so,

Lauren (11:46.072)
over time they notice that they become very critical of themselves internally. They become very argumentative and I know I've done it a lot with myself too because the more exhausted you are, the more that you just can't even with things that do actually need your attention, right? Like it is way harder to have to do 10 loads of laundry at a time.

because you've been so exhausted for so long that you couldn't even do one load, you know, every couple of days in order to not have the 10 loads build up in the first place, right? And then you get all harsh with yourself about it. And I really feel like a lot of the self -criticism and the self -doubt and the self -deprecating thoughts and feelings that we have about ourselves are really coming from a place of trying to take on too much.

We're trying to take on too much responsibility. We're trying to take on a lot of responsibility and a lot of perspectives and perceptions that are not ours to begin with, right? And so then we have our own responsibilities and then we feel like we have other responsibilities coming from other people that are not ours, but we think that they are. And so we take on too much.

right? We just, we take on too much, become overwhelmed, we become exhausted, and there just are not enough hours in the day sometimes, right? And so it's really easy to see that our amount of rest, the amount in terms of each individual time and also the amount in terms of a sustained

frequency, right, in terms of our rest in our self -care. The amount of rest in self -care that we get is directly proportionate to our current mood, obviously, but also our current perspectives and our current attitudes and how much we're able and willing to receive out of life, right? When we have gotten rest and taken better care of ourselves,

Lauren (14:04.696)
We are much more likely to sit and listen to our children or a partner with open heart, with open mind, with open ears. We're much more likely to be like, yeah, let's go do that art project together. I know it's going to make a mess, but it's not the end of the world. No one's going to die if we make a mess. Right? And, and so there's this shift.

this total shift of not just mood, but of perspective of what is a big deal and what's not a big deal and what we're willing to give our time and energy to and what we're not. And in that shift, we see the shift of what we're willing and able to receive out of life. And we can also notice how directly proportionate, proportional our...

rest is to our physical health, right? I mean, we talk about exhaustion, but we all know that we can only handle so much stress, so much exhaustion, even in terms of sleep, we can only handle lack of sleep. We can only handle those things for so long before you know good and well that as soon as you have a day off, your body is going to force you to rest, right? You're going to get sick because your dis -ease turns into disease, right?

It's literally the dis -ease that you feel in your mind and in your heart turns into disease in your body. And alternatively, when you do make rest, when you do make time for rest and sustain that energetic balance so that you can give and receive in flow, right? Bring balance to the masculine and feminine energies. You don't have dis -ease, you just have ease, right? Everything is just so much more

easy. Everything just flows so much more because you are willing to flow wherever the energy goes, right? You're doing one thing, your child wants to do another, and you can more easily go with the flow because you can see that it's not a big deal for you to shift a little bit in order for your child or your partner, whoever it is, to be happy and to explore and to just do something different, right? And even for

Lauren (16:25.784)
yourself when you are alone, it's so much easier for you to just kind of become unattached from whatever expectation you maybe had for yourself that day or whatever, whatever you thought you were gonna do and then something happens and then you just become much more adaptable, we become much more flexible, right? When we've had rest, when we have ease, when we are in flow.

So, rest, again, sleep is a big part of it, sure, but it's not just rest. I mean, it's not just sleep. Me and the words this week, I tell you. So, rest is partly about sleep, but when I talk about intentional rest, I talk about true rest, I want us to look at the word restore, right? Rest is the root word of restore.

because it should be restorative. Rest should reinstate what was gone. Rest should repair what was lost. Rest should renovate what was broken down. And so I came up with this little tagline, real rest restores. If it's not restoring you, if it's not reinstating, repairing, or renovating, it's not real rest, right? So,

Just that little tagline, you can, you can hashtag it, you can use it, you can share it, you can do whatever you want with it. Real rest restores. If you do nothing else with it, please use it for yourself and remember that and come back to that. Real rest restores. And so what does that mean? It means honoring your need, your basic need to be healthy and whole, no matter how busy your schedule is or isn't. It's

doing the things that restore your energy and raise your health and bring your frequency back to where it should be, right? And this is just, when I talk about this, I'm just talking about, again, restoring. I'm just talking about bringing things back again to where they should be, to a baseline. So we're not even necessarily talking about...

Lauren (18:49.624)
going above and beyond that into manifesting, which I think is where a lot of people often get stuck as well is on one hand, they believe in the laws of the universe and the magic of creator. And on the other hand, they're still stuck very much in this like, well, I have to, I have to, I have to hustle. I have to, I have to make it happen, right? It's this very forceful type of energy that they're trying to assert over.

over the laws of the universe and over creators plan and over their life. And so these two things, butt heads, they're going like this, they're having friction and they just don't go together. Before you can get to a place where your frequency is raising high enough to be in a place of true manifestation, we need to make sure that we are first restored. We need to lay that foundation. We need to build in a level of sustainability.

of the balance with our masculine and feminine energies, with our survivability and our comfortability and our comfort and our joy and our love and our vision, right? We need to build those foundations for ourselves before we can get to a place where we can feel like we can go above and beyond that to create something that's higher, higher and next. But what's really...

beautiful about this is when we get better about making more time more frequently for that intentional rest, for that sustainability, for finding the balance between giving and receiving and we start to practice receiving and practice being the recipient.

not just hustling, not just providing, not just giving, but we really get good at receiving. We really get good at allowing people to help us. We get good at allowing people to nurture us. We get good at allowing others and the universe to provide for us, even above and beyond our basic needs, right, but to also fulfill our desires for us. Then we can start

Lauren (21:12.344)
transitioning into that higher frequency where we can start to come into manifesting because you can say your affirmations all day, you can get your project 369 book and write out all you want to, but if you're not able and willing to receive, if your heart and your energy and your mind are open to the fact that you don't have to make it happen,

that it can just happen for you and you can just be in ease and flow and relax and allow and receive it without having to force it in any kind of way. If you can't believe that then you won't get it. Right? You can write it down. You can do what you want, but if you're not willing to receive that it's actually possible or possible for you or that you don't have to...

force or have a lot of this, you know, constricting energy around it, it's just, it's not gonna come. It's not, no matter how much time goes by, right? You have to, you really have to focus on getting a level, again, of that sustainability for yourself, a level of...

Balance, right? If you didn't already, I highly recommend you go back and listen to episode 10 I think it is of this podcast where I talk all about balance, the fact that it is a moving target and it takes practice, but we can always find it in a number of different ways, but this is by far and above when it comes to taking care of yourself in body, mind, and spirit. This is this is the biggest concept.

that you can focus on, this is the biggest feeling and being, level of being that you can focus on and practice is finding the balance between giving and receiving. Okay, my love, so what does it look like to get some more intentional rest in your life, to get some more of that proper relaxation and restoration? What does it look like? So again, when I said at the beginning of

Lauren (23:33.336)
of this episode that inherently there's nothing wrong with just needing to zone out, watch an episode or two of a show you like after work, playing on your phone for a few minutes, whatever it is, but again it's about the intentionality. So I think I've said this in at least one other episode before, but something that I have my clients do that works wonders for them is when they do work,

jobs that they find are quite stressful. They come home at the end of the day, they decide that they're going to play on their phone to zone out for a little bit and kind of purge that heavy energy out, which is great, but set a timer. Set a timer. And in that time, you can binge watch whatever you want, but you set a timer and when the timer goes off, that's it, because then that's when you get up and you decide, okay, it's over. I'm disconnected from my work day.

I've, you know, gotten it all out, and now I'm going to move on to something that is going to restore and reinstate and renovate me from the inside out so that you can find that balance from day to day and it's really not hard. So what other things can you do to get more of that restoration, right? Well, it's definitely about making sure that you're getting really good, healthy meals.

Right? Whether you find cooking an enjoyable activity or not, make sure that you're finding a way to get really good healthy meals that also make your body feel restored. Right? Also moving your body and meditating and getting exercises and doing those things that not only shake up some of that energy and keep it flowing and moving, but that are also obviously inherently very good for

for your physical health as well and restoring your body back to those natural energy levels that you're designed to have, right? When you go look at any and all, longevity, reports, the number one thing that gets older populations into a state of decline and disease is their stagnation.

Lauren (25:58.52)
in life, their physical stagnation. When we become physically stagnant, we become energetically stagnant, we become mentally and emotionally stagnant, and that is what allows disease to set into your entire being and puts you in that state of decline. And that's also why you see in the elderly population a huge, what is the word I'm looking for? Like, not incremental, but a, but a huge

incremental decline in health once you put an elderly person in a home. Because once they're in a home, their level of interaction with friends and family and their autonomy and independence and taking care of themselves, all those things decline so quickly. They become so much more stagnant. The word is right on the tip of my tongue. They become so much more

stagnant the disease sets in so fast and they decline so fast unfortunately. And so we can obviously see how those things can start to happen even earlier on in life. The more stagnant we are, the more disease that we feel the less and yet the less rested we feel at the same time, right? We don't feel rested because we're not being restored. So make sure that you are restoring and rejuvenating yourself in body.

first getting those healthy meals, getting good movement, getting sunshine, getting fresh air, going out in nature, right? All of those things. But you can also, here's like a really cool thing that I learned recently, is you can get a human design reading or you can download a human design app. And it's very similar to astrology. So you plug in, you know, your birth information and it generates your human design chart, or you can get a reading with a certified human design reader.

If you're not familiar with Jen Torres, she's based in Milwaukee, Wisconsin at the moment. She has a podcast also called She's a God, but she's a human design reader and I mean her sessions are super in depth and one of the things that I learned about myself is that I actually unplug best just by being out in nature. Even if I...

Lauren (28:20.088)
I can't go outside if it's stormy or it's too hot or whatever it is, even if I just put everything down and stare out the window for a little while. Just to have even that visual connection with nature helps me to really unplug and refresh and restore and then I'm like, okay. And it helps me to like bring my focus back and bring my energy back. So get a human design reading. You will learn all kinds of things about yourself that you didn't know. And it's actually really cool.

Another thing I really want to encourage you to do is that...

You do not need to justify your rest or your restoration to anybody, including yourself, my love. If you decide that whatever kind of practice you're going to instate is something

that becomes non -negotiable for you, whether that's on a daily, weekly, or monthly basis, whatever it is, or multiple, you have multiple arrest and restoration practices that you do, you know, with different levels of frequency, you do not need to justify to anybody that that has become a non -negotiable for you and that that is what you need to do, even if it's a one -off situation. Hey, I'm not feeling my best, I need to take a rest, eh?

Take a fucking rest day and don't feel like you have to tell anybody why you're doing it or what you're doing while you're resting. Okay? Because this is about you. It's your life, it's your health, it's your restoration, it's your balance. It's not a community project. You don't need to justify it to anybody. And just by the mere fact that you start to feel like you don't need to justify it brings so much relief, doesn't it?

Lauren (30:20.28)
Just feel that relief. It's beautiful, right? It's also okay to allow yourself to be like, you know what, I'm just kind of tapped out for the day. And there are other things I wanna get done, but I just feel like if I do it right now, I'm gonna do it from a place of force. I'm gonna do it from a place of obligation. And I just don't want the end product to reflect that. And so I'm just gonna be okay with not doing it today. And I will rest and I will...

you know, come back and do it tomorrow. And when I do it tomorrow, I will do it better, right? It's okay to just be a little bit flexible with that. And it's okay to be flexible with your routines in general, knowing that, again, as I talked about in episode 10 about finding balance, it's okay to recognize that we are ever growing, ever evolving humans. And so it's okay to be flexible with our routines and to change things around and to...

you know, have this plan and then to be like, but that didn't work out for me today. It's, you know, so just finding those, those places in your every day and your every week and your every month where you can be like, okay.

You know, this maybe wasn't what I had planned, it wasn't what I expected, but this is what I feel like maybe needs to happen for me right now and just allowing, right? So again, allowing is that same energy as receiving and it opens up that gateway to the law of attraction so you can receive more, so you can receive more restoration, so you can receive more abundance, right my love? Okay, with that I want to remind you...

that as Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh says, every step you take for yourself you also take for everyone else. And if getting some extra help, getting a little extra boost, getting some extra guidance is something that you've had on your heart to help you with your process of restoration and growth and expansion and abundance, I would love to connect with you and explore some options for some different

Lauren (32:34.424)
programs that I have available now and some more programs that I'm going to be having available very soon, which I'm so incredibly excited about. More on that later. I want to tell you all about it now, but more on that later. But two offerings that I have open right now. I have six months of one -on -one available. We meet every other week. You have homework in between. It's completely tailored to you. And this is my signature offer. It's what I have done for...

years and what has gotten people not just to where they wanted to go, but where they've gone so far and above beyond where they thought they would go in terms of their their joy, their level of joy, how happy they are, how fulfilled they are, and how free they feel, and and how much love they get to give and receive in every area of their life.

because they were able to just cut through the noise and clear the clutter and bring awareness to what's important and what's not important. And sometimes you just need a little bit of help sorting through those things. And so this is a huge part of what we do together. Obviously it's the body, mind and spirit work. So it's definitely meant for the people who are ready to dive in and dig deep and do some of that work, but we do it together and we do it for six months.

The other kind of like mini offer I have, if you're just looking for a little bit of a boost right now, is called Break the Barrier. And it's a two hour kind of breakout session with me where we look at your astrological birth chart to get some clarity on kind of what drives you. I kind of want to say like why you are the way you are in certain aspects of life.

It doesn't tell the full picture obviously because human experience plays a big part in that, but it gives us a big foundation. It gives a lot of clarity to people who are like, that's why I do that every time I encounter this situation. Right, so we start by looking at that just to get the foundation, but then we also talk about some of your life experiences and it's basically like coaching session from there. So again, this is one -on -one with me, it's two hours.

Lauren (34:48.216)
applications for Break the Barrier as well as for one -on -one which I call Acorn to Oak. They are up in my link tree so the link tree is in the show notes. Also make sure that you're keeping an eye on what I'm doing on different social feeds. I'm primarily on Facebook right now but starting to get more into TikTok a little bit here. But keeping an eye on those things or you can join my email list whichever is most convenient for you.

If you join my email list, you actually get the best of the best of more exclusive wisdom and content offers, upcoming discounts on offers, bonuses, all that kind of great stuff. And if nothing else, just please make sure that if you enjoy this podcast, if you love what I'm putting out there, that you subscribe to it so you get notified every time a new episode comes out. And please share it. And if you do share it, tag me in it so that I can see that you shared it.

I just, I love it. I love all the sharing. I love making an impact on people as a coach, as a podcaster, as a human being. It's ingrained in me to help you with everything that is ingrained in you. So on that note, always remember that you are met for more, my love. It's coded within you. Your wealth, your blessings, your native growth. Thank you so much for joining me today. I love you so much. Have a great week.

and an awesome weekend. Enjoy some beautiful sunshine and summer unfolding if you're in the Northern Hemisphere or I guess like winter unfolding if you're in the Southern Hemisphere, but just enjoy life and enjoy it intentionally. I love you so much and I'll see you next week.