Since our final Advanced Grief Tending & Ritual Facilitation Retreat wrapped a few weeks ago, I’ve been dropping into sleep the way a stone drops into deep water – sudden, complete, irresistible gravitational force.
Eight, nine, ten hours at a stretch some nights. Occasionally 12.
Some powerful dreams have come through, but mostly it’s that particular quality of sleep where you wake confused about what day it is, what country you’re in, and whether you’ve been asleep for hours or days.
And alongside this bone-deep rest, something else has been surfacing: a familiar anxiety. That very British, colonial voice that says, “You should be doing something. There are emails to send, courses to promote, plans to make. Things won’t work out unless you focus, unless you do stuff!!”
I’ve been noticing this voice. Hello, old friend. And then I roll over and fall back to sleep. 🙂
What I’m learning – what my body is teaching me – is that resting is actually the most essential work, for me, at this time.
This deep rest, this unwinding of the nervous system, this letting the mind finally, finally stop micromanaging everything .. this is where the real transformation happens.
After all, how do I think this whole miracle we call life really works, anyways???
Closing our final Grief Tending & Ritual Facilitation Training Retreat with offerings to the land.
A friend and mentor of mine just returned from her second trip to Bali, where she has very quickly been woven deeply into the life of the village she visits. I was telling her about my relationship with rest, and she shared this story:
In Bali, everyone lies down at least twice a day. On the floor. It’s just what you do – part of the natural rhythm of the day. Some people nap. Some read. Some just lie there, maybe scrolling their phone, maybe doing nothing at all. But everybody rests. Twice. Every day.
My friend said it was deeply uncomfortable at first. “We don’t do this in my culture,” she told her Balinese hosts. “This isn’t a thing for us.”
They were baffled. Genuinely confused. “Well, what do you do then?” they asked.
“We just… don’t rest. We keep going. We sit at our desks and work”
Her friends looked at each other. Then back at her. “Oh,” they said, with a kind of gentle clarity, nodding their heads. “This must be why western people are so sick.”
They understood immediately what we’ve been conditioned to forget: rest isn’t earned. It’s not a reward for productivity. It’s not something you get to do after you’ve accomplished enough. Rest is how the human body-mind-soul-system stays alive, stays sane, stays connected to the rhythms that sustain all life.
As you may already know, I also travelled this fall – to my Ancestral homeland of Ireland. It was such a gift to connect with and deepen my Ancestral Cultural roots which are very connected to natural cycles.
The whole month of November is considered to be Samhain time in old Irish culture – not just a single night of celebration, (also known as Hallowe’en! ) but an entire moon cycle of threshold time.
And Samhain isn’t an ending, even though it’s all about death, compost & Ancestors.
It’s actually the ‘Witches New Year’ or Celtic/Pagan New Year.
It’s the doorway into the long wintering cycle of death/renewal that runs all the way through to Imbolg in February.
We’re not talking a brief pause before returning to the normal hustle and bustle. We’re talking “get comfortable” – as we’re just settling in now to a stretch of time set aside for deep dreaming, reflection and wintering.
Bridge at Keem Head, County Mayo
And if you’re in grief – whether you’re tending others through their grief or moving through your own – this rest isn’t optional. It’s the exact medicine you will be needing.
Grieving as process is a kind of wintering in and of itself. Beginning with a liminal time surrounding the loss or change, and then deepening into the complete recalibration our nervous systems have to do after a major loss.
Science shows that the brain actually goes through a massive recalibration during the grief process. We often have to orient to something that was a daily part of our lives just being gone. And that takes some neuroplasticity and rewiring, to put it mildly.
When we’re in grief – when our whole world has shifted, when we’re processing loss, when old patterns and unprocessed emotions are surfacing – we need even more rest than usual. Not less.
And when you combine the “winter” of grieving with the wintering cycle of nature, it becomes a very deep time indeed.
So what’s actually happening when we rest? What’s going on in all that sleeping, all that lying on the floor, all that staring into space or wandering forest paths, inner and outer?
Everything.
Think of the mycelium network underground. The vast web of fungal threads connecting tree roots, breaking down what’s dead, moving nutrients where they’re needed, communicating information across the forest floor. In autumn and winter, when the visible world goes quiet, this is when the most essential, yet also invisible, work happens.
Decomposition. The transformation of death into life. The rewiring of the entire system.
This is what’s happening in your nervous system when we slow down – when we stare into space, when we wander aimlessly, and when we sleep.
The brain is literally rewiring itself. Neural pathways that have been running the same loops for years – the productivity panic, the colonial “not enough,” the grip of unprocessed grief – these pathways can finally start to loosen, to decompose, to transform into something new.
Unprocessed grief surfaces. Old anxiety comes up. Not because something’s wrong, but because you’ve finally created enough spaciousness for your system to release what it’s been holding.
The body knows what needs to come up and out. It knows what needs to break down so something else can grow.
But it can’t do this work while you’re in goal-oriented motion. It can’t rewire while you’re performing, producing, pushing through.
The composting happens in the dark. In the stillness. In the deep rest that our culture has taught us to fear and avoid.
This is partly why the timing matters. It’s not a coincidence that your body might be calling for more rest right now, in November, as the days grow shorter and nature turns inward & downward if you’re in the Northern Hemisphere.(If you’re in the Southern Hemisphere, there’s something similar but different happening as you draw close to the top of the wheel of the year!)
Samhain marks the beginning of the dark half of the year in the Irish calendar. It’s the threshold between worlds, the time when the veil is thin and the ancestors draw near. The Callieagh, the Old Woman of Winter, brings the storms that drive us to seek shelter and warmth.
A whole month of liminal space, of honouring death and what lies beyond the visible world.
Samhain is the start of the wintering cycle that runs all the way through to Imbolg in early February. We’re entering months of deepening, of turning inward, of letting the old year compost while the seeds of the new year germinate in the dark.
The earth herself is resting. The trees have dropped their leaves. The sap has gone down into the roots. The soil is doing its slow, invisible work of transformation.
And we are not separate from nature. We are part of the same cycle, the same seasonal rhythm, the same need to winter.
When you feel that pull toward rest right now, when your body wants to sleep more, to do less, to turn away from the bright demanding world – this isn’t laziness. It isn’t necessarily depression, either. It might just be your animal body recognizing the season, remembering its place in, as poet Mary Oliver says, ‘the family of things,’ and the more-than-human world.
This might just be your nervous system showing you what it needs to be deeply healthy.
So here’s what I want to offer you, whether you’re a grief tender holding space for others or someone moving through your own loss and change:
Trust the rest.
Trust the deep sleep, the afternoon lying on the floor, the days when you can’t seem to focus on anything productive. Trust that your body-mind-soul knows what it’s doing, even when the ‘colonial’ voice says you’re wasting time.
Dogs know. And it does help to have someone fuzzy to rest your head on.
You’re not wasting time. You’re composting. You’re rewiring. You’re letting the old patterns break down so something new can grow.
And this is essential work.
And if anxiety or grief surfaces alongside the rest – if that voice starts telling you that things won’t work out unless you do something – notice it. Breathe. Recognize it for what it is: not truth, but conditioning. The voice of a culture that fears stillness because stillness reveals what we’ve been hiding and running from.
Let yourself feel what needs to be felt. Let the unprocessed grief come up. Let the old anxiety surface. This is the medicine working. This is the mycelium doing its underground work.
Rest isn’t something you have to earn.
Rest is how you live. How you heal. How you become who you’re meant to be on the other side of this grief, this loss, this great transition.
So sleep when you need to sleep. Lie down on the floor twice a day if that’s what your body wants. Lock your office door, draw the blinds and lay on your yoga mat during your lunch break if you need to.
Let the world keep spinning without you for a while.
The spring will come. Imbolg will arrive. Movement, impulse, rhythm & action will return in time.
But first, we have to winter.
First, we have to rest.
Wishing you long moments of deep rest and solace,
Grá Mór,
Josea