Learning To Release, Rest, Remain | Letting Go and Letting God

In this episode, we react to Yvette Henry’s podcast episode and her book Release, Rest, Remain, unpacking what these powerful ideas actually look like in real life. 

How do you truly let go of what is weighing you down? What does it mean to find real rest in God’s presence? And how do you stay grounded in His love when life feels anything but steady? We dive into these topics and unpack the nuggets that Yvette left us in the previous episode. 

Listen to the first conversation here: https://youtu.be/6bpG78wFlc0

Connect with us: https://linktr.ee/skillsandpillspodcast

Yvette Henry’s book: https://yvettehenry.com/releaserestremaindevotional

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:07

That was so good. I I am full. I everything about the episode with Yvette Henry left us full. That's the only word that I can think of. Full, ready to slow down, if it involves self-care, if that's what the heart needs. As a matter of fact, what does the heart need? And considering that and giving a moment to live life in the flow of the breath. What breath do you need? Do you need a self-care breath? Do you need a vacation breath? Do you just need a moment, like we say here to reflect, reset, and retool? Yvette Henry being here solidified what we believe about working from a place of rest. There's so much to unpack about that episode.

SPEAKER_01 1:14

I mean, I was I was sitting with it all of the rest of the day. Um, and you know, I I've been thumbing through the book, and um I think she was absolutely right when she was saying, like, this is not something that you rush through. It says 30 days on the title, but that does not mean that you're running through it in 30 days. Like, I have there's some sections I've reread. Um, one thing I loved about this devotional is the permission it gives. Because you know I got beef with devotionals. Beef with devotionals. And a part of the reason I think I have beef with devotionals hang in there with me. Um, I love devotionals and I love the self-help space. But I think a lot of times for me, as somebody who had like a little bit more of that performance perfection kind of personality or what had some high-functioning anxiety, um, for me it was a really big struggle. It became something to do on my to-do list. It became something that would actually stress me. And then I also have ADHD. So when I didn't finish the devotionals, you know, I would be feeling really bad, really guilty. And it was just another thing that I wasn't doing well at. And so for me, I I very quickly, earlier on in my Christian walk, said, I really just don't need the devotional. Okay. I love my I love my scripture, my word, and I love a to read a good book. But what I love about hers is this, she calls it an invitation, and it's truly that. Yeah. There is this is an invitation, this is permission. She even says it in there. She's like, this is not something that you check off on your to-do list. I was like, we are aligned. Right. Because I don't need another thing to do. You know, people are out here, they're like for me, I can only use me as an example. I'm a mom, I'm a wife, I'm a sister, a friend, a daughter, I'm an entrepreneur, I'm a business owner, I'm a podcast host, I'm a content creator, I'm a the list can go on. And on and on. And on and on. And so adding something to that a lot of times can feel really weighty. Yeah. Um, you know, and um I think can kind of promote that fail sense of failing, spiritual and emotional failing. I didn't get my devotion today, right? There have been seasons of my life where I had hours to sit in prayer and devotional time. And there are seasons like this season where that devotional time is hit in the car in the parent pickup line or in the shower while I'm trying to get myself ready after I got the kids ready, or you know, on a quick walk, um, you know, in between errands or work. And so in this season, it looks different. And books like this allow me to realize that that's okay for it to look different for my rest, right? And for me remaining in him, not to be necessarily hours of devotional time, but to be, he can come and rest with me in the moment.

SPEAKER_00 4:14

Or actually being um having him centered, right? So even listening because the world is clamoring, right? Like things are moving around. I have to do this, I have to do that. I I think uh sometimes when you get into social mobility and different things like that, there becomes this desire to press in this desire to go, go, go, go, go. And I like uh you recapping her talking about invitation. Right. Because the world will give you an invitation to burnout, right? The world will give you an invitation to not focus on your healing journey because you're so busy. Right. Hustle culture will give you the invitation to never stop. Right. So to encounter uh a tool. Uh I can totally, and I said this to her, I can totally see myself as a mental health professional and a therapist using this particular book as bibliotherapy.

SPEAKER_01 5:24

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 5:25

If I have my executive that is, you know, trying to figure out how to slow down, try you, uh, you, I was about to say you would be shocked, but you may not be shocked because I know you do a lot of research and a lot of uh stats, but the number of people that would probably appreciate an invitation to just slow the pace. Right. What is the what are the implications, if you will, or the cost of not slowing the pace?

SPEAKER_01 5:59

Right.

SPEAKER_00 5:59

What what does that look like even?

SPEAKER_01 6:01

Right. And I think um, you know, something that was very eye-opening for me is when she said, like one of our primary or one of our first calls, or one of our first things that we um our purpose to do is to abide. And I think a lot of us, because like you said, the invitation of the world to work, work, work, to hustle culture, to to do all of these things. I think a lot of times we forget that our purpose, our primary purpose relies in abiding and resting in him, being a child first, a child of God first, and then right, all of these things. Put seek first the kingdom of heaven, and all of these things will be added to you. And I like how in the book she says, not things like when I'm praying for that house, that car, that job, those things are great, and they're not those things are not bad within themselves. Actually, those things are vehicles and tools in which he allows us to advance the kingdom. But it was very much a pivot for me to be like, for example, I can only talk about me now. Right. Um, this podcast, I love what we're doing here. Do it for the people, and I love when people tell us how much it's changing them. Like we had somebody DM us yesterday and say that our podcast was getting them through some of the darkest days of their life.

SPEAKER_00 7:25

Wow.

SPEAKER_01 7:26

That's powerful. Powerful what the Lord is doing through this vehicle. Um, but I think from a perspective of the one carrying this, um, and we've been talking all year about what we carry. Um carrying this, I am realizing that it is not our goal and our aim to be big.

SPEAKER_00 7:48

Right.

SPEAKER_01 7:49

If we get to be big, it's because God decided more people needed the things that he's doing through it.

SPEAKER_00 7:56

That makes me full.

SPEAKER_01 7:58

But it is our job to show up here and sit on these cute little couches with the cute little look at this. That's cute, that's cute. It's wonderful. You like it? You like it? It this is nice. Yeah, but showing up to this without understanding that it is our primary purpose in this to bring people the truth. Yeah. To to to expose people to the truth, not only in the sense of the gospel, which is first for us as faith-based um uh mental health providers and people that provide faith-based therapy and tools. Um, when we're talking to people about their healing journey, it's not enough for us just to show up here and just talk to you about that, but also to give you quality evidence-based tips and tools. This is correct, right? That um allow you to balance your healing journey from the perspective of I, it's okay for me to show up and say I'm not okay. It's okay for me to ask for help. It's okay for me to meet need mental health support. So, in the same way, her devotion was an invitation for us to abide. This pod, it's it aligns so perfectly with our pod because we want to give you an invitation not only to abide in him, but an invitation to allow him to carry everything that you cannot carry, to carry all your burden, to carry all your hardship. Now you're still gonna be touched by a very real world, touched by humanity, and you may have some mental health needs that are it's okay, you're human, right? And so what we want to do here, and I think it it gave me a shifting. Um, we believe in the shift here. Um and it and it shifted my mindset about what we're doing here. Yeah. If that's fair.

SPEAKER_00 9:40

I think it's is totally fair. And for anyone who leads, for all of us that lead, we often talk about you're leading somewhere. You're leading, if you're mom, you're leading your home. If you're an executive, you're leading your business pastor, a church, mental health professionals, we lead. Even though it's two people in the room, you we're leading because what is therapy, what is counseling, but one person a little bit ahead on the wellness spectrum or the healing journey, than the other. So I believe that one of the dangerous spaces, and I can say dangerous because um vicarious trauma uh and compassion fatigue, those are dangerous things for mental health professionals because we house, when you said talk about carry, we carry not only the the being touched by the world of our in our life, right, but we carry all the things that touch the people that we service. It's true. On top of a lot of times being empaths or being empathetic. In order for me to be empathetic, there's a piece of me that's open to your scenario, that's open to your concern, open to your struggle, your transition. So thinking about all of that, this is an invitation, even to us as mental health professionals and leaders, to not put the onus on ourselves to have the answer. I don't know in my 25 years of mental health professional working where I've ever felt, okay, nope, let me digress. In all transparency, maybe the first couple of years, I was what I used to call a baby counselor or a baby case manager, or when I was new and entering into a new competency, sometimes it took me a moment to say, okay, I don't need this person to attach to me. I need them to attach to the work that I'm presenting, the skill that I'm offering, the tool that I'm offering. So I can't say how much of a relief it is. And I want to encourage, because we have uh emergent or up-and-coming mental health professionals that engage us as well, that say, Oh, you know, I can see the work that I want to do, future casted and the work that you guys do. And so this is a good opportunity and invitation to be able to model the ability or privilege to carry to God in prayer, but not to carry and house within myself all of the materials and things that are picked up. I like to call it residue. Right. That is a picked up along the way as we do the divine. And I I'm gonna in this moment put a pen in it and advocate for the divine work and purpose of biblically integrative mental health counseling, mental health therapy, the therapeutic processes that help people to navigate healing journeys that are often people don't even express sometimes all of the things that they go through.

SPEAKER_01 13:20

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 13:21

There's no way I can meet you in the customer service line, in the church lobby, in the PTA meeting, and express to you, we have to have spaces. And yes, I have to say we have to, because one of the driving needs grounded in counseling is of the human experience and human nature is to be loved and belong. So we have to have spaces that when our love is interrupted, when our belonging is interrupted, where are the spaces that we unpack that? I do not as a mental health professional want to take the responsibility or the onus of housing and carrying all of the material that comes across our path in practice.

SPEAKER_01 14:16

Yeah, yeah. So it I think in in those instances, like kind of like you're saying, where you're like, we could use this as bibliotherapy for clients. The interesting thing is we can use it for ourselves to be able to give yourself that that moment to unplug and that moment to um, I I love it, release. Let's talk about that first R. Release it. You've gotta release some things. You can't carry. There are some things that we're meant to carry. I'm gonna be honest with you, right? Um, there's some things that we are meant to carry, but it is, I I believe it is the wisdom to know what I am to carry and what I'm not. I love that. What things can I release and say, ooh, we talked a little bit um about radical acceptance recently um in one of our lives, and it is um a DBT tool. So we focus on CBT here a lot. Yeah. Um, but you will hear us occasionally draw from some other theories, and so DBT is one of those. Um, but radical acceptance um was something that had came up recently when we were talking about resilience and what it looks like to not try to change the reality of environments, people, or things. Sometimes I think when we say, okay, I'm gonna speak it into existence or things like that, we sometimes I think we use it properly. We shouldn't be speaking like life and death is in the power of the tongue, and we shouldn't speak death of ourselves. But I think sometimes we are failing to radically accept some things. I cannot speak somebody's will. If somebody says that they're gonna do something or they behave in a certain way, and I say, This is hurtful to me, or this doesn't work for me, or I try to place boundaries and they don't meet me there. I can't speak that into existence. They have their autonomous will and the right and the right to live to do what they want. It is hard.

SPEAKER_00 16:16

That is difficult, like for me, especially in the work that we do a lot of times. You want so bad. Like you're sitting there, and this is a misconception about the work we do in mental health and when we walk with people in our healing journey. Often people believe and look for advice, right?

SPEAKER_01 16:38

And we don't give advice if you have a therapist giving you advice, run away. Run. They're not supposed to be telling you what to do, how, and how to be. Yeah, how to be. I love that.

SPEAKER_00 16:50

I was gonna be able to say how to do it, but that will go into skills and technique, and you can give someone more effective coping mechanisms, but you're right, how to be, right? They can look at patterns, right? I can look at patterns, and we can look at patterns together. So it's not really much telling a person what to do or how to be, as it is opening what we call insight. You literally want a person, uh, I I would want my therapist to look at me.

SPEAKER_01 17:23

Insight is like that aha moment where that like the light bulb goes off and you're like, oh, right. That's why. That's how. That's it's that aha moment for our living people.

SPEAKER_00 17:36

Or that's when. That's when. Because sometimes I don't know why I function in the present in this way. Right. But if I go to the inception of where that negative cognition was created, then I can say, oh, that's when it happened. And I can put a stop on that life marker. I can reconstruct the way it made me think. We're getting we're therapizing.

SPEAKER_01 18:01

Are we therapizing? I love it. It's a therapy podcast. We're gonna therapeze from time to time. We're also gonna talk about Jesus. We're gonna do both.

SPEAKER_00 18:11

I love what we do. I love what we get to do. Don't you love what we do? So just that moment right there, right? And the feeling having somebody like you that come in the space and normalize for us. Listen, don't you be trying to figure it out? This is what I heard too. Don't you be trying, why are you trying to figure it out? Like, why aren't you just abiding? Right, rest in him. If I abide in you and you abide in me. Right. This used to be my daddy's favorite scripture, girl. He would be he would say it through the house. The father is divine. Don't get it, don't get him worked up. Like, so I grew up on why are you trying to do anything outside of him anyway anyway? Right. Let me tell you why. Because I'm an A-type personality. Right. Let me tell you why. Because a lot of us are doers in our lives as leaders, and so as doers in our lives as leaders, we often forget to just be. And when let's talk about uh bring back compassion fatigue and um vicarious trauma when you work in certain spaces and burnout. And the reason why I kind of like burnout, because you hear burnout, burnout, burnout, burnout. But a lot of times burnout, compassion fatigue, and um vicarious trauma are used interchangeably. But research has told us 15 years of research, promise, has told us that they're not one and the same. And so I think we're really when we talk about the invitation to release, I thank you for allowing me, even cult from a culturally competent space, as a black woman. I'm a brown girl, I often say that as if somebody can see it. But I say it to remind myself that there are tropes and there are things that come along with me being an African-American woman that cause me to move through life dense and causes me to not as readily release as I would. So this invitation is even culturally competent. Like it hits so many spaces, and like there's so many places that you could take this particular book, but you started with release, and that's what I felt about that.

SPEAKER_01 20:46

Yeah, I mean, I feel like for me that was the I mean, of course we the resting room, like it's all so good. Um, but just that was revelatory to me. Yeah. Um, you know, and she even mentions it in the book. I opened up like the first couple of pages and she talked about what you were carrying, and I was like, we were just talking about that. Like it's just it's beautiful when the the Lord puts two people in the same room um and he'd been working out the same things or the same thoughts or the same, it put us on the same wavelength or put us on his um on the same path of of thought. Um, and so to open that page and be that was confirmation for me.

SPEAKER_00 21:24

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 21:25

Um, to just open that page and be like, okay, we're in the right spot, doing the right thing with the right person with the right time. And so when that happens, I know I'm like, it's good stuff.

SPEAKER_00 21:37

And just even the the people that are just divinely assigned to our life in this season. If you talk about the pod, like I don't know that outside of God, the engagements that we've made could have they couldn't. Let's just it's impossible.

SPEAKER_01 21:59

It would have. Been without God impossible.

SPEAKER_00 22:03

Yeah, I can't carry that.

SPEAKER_01 22:05

Right.

SPEAKER_00 22:05

I believe there's a certain amount of us that understood the clarion call to do what we're doing. But the reason why I believe Yvette Henry's book spoke so much in the area of caring is we also clearly understood that the vision that we saw could not ever be accomplished in our strength.

SPEAKER_01 22:32

Right.

SPEAKER_00 22:33

In who we are. I often say, if you can think it, if you can believe it, you can do it. And that doesn't mean to go and do something radical right now that you're not prepared for. What that believes is, but what that means is we just come from a space that because we abide, right? When you abide, then those beliefs and those thoughts and those things are not yours to house. Right. They're not yours to build. And most importantly, they are not yours to own.

SPEAKER_01 23:16

Right.

SPEAKER_00 23:16

They're not.

SPEAKER_01 23:17

If I'm here and yours to own is that come on now.

SPEAKER_00 23:22

Release it. Release the thought. If you feel like you own anything, if I feel like I own anything, I have just put myself in a dangerous place because at that particular point, all I have is my humanity as a reservoir and a protection. I will not. We will not. Skills and pills. Podcasts will not. It was just a reminder.

SPEAKER_01 23:58

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 23:59

To remain. And I'm pretty sure as she, because the book has only been out about a month. I know. So no one has had really a chance to read straight through it. Yeah. But I am interested. Like, I don't know what that looks like.

SPEAKER_01 24:13

I when I was talking to her, I remember you were like, did you ever think that there'd be therapists that would pick up your book? And she was like, no. No. No. She's like, I was trying to make it through my own. I was just trying to make it through my own thing. Or just share what how I made it through my own thing. And I remember sitting there in that moment, I was like, I don't even think she understands. She knows how important this work is. How many, how fundamental. Like I believe in 10 to 15 years we're gonna be like that that book is a staple.

SPEAKER_00 24:41

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 24:42

It's a staple because the the things that are in it I think in the things that are in it ha have to be. I very rarely say have to be. No, we never say finite all the time. But I think for this occasion. But we're reading it, I think these things have to be communicated.

SPEAKER_00 25:01

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 25:02

They have to, people have to write this on their heart. That I I more important than what I do, more important than who I become is who I already am in him when I rest in him. In him. In him. Yeah. And I think that that to me is now I get to do all the things.

SPEAKER_00 25:22

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 25:23

I get to sit on the pod, I get to be a business owner, I get to, I get to go places, do things, I get to serve in my local church. But more importantly, the most important thing I do when I stand before him will have been how I made disciples of the nations, right? Our call, how I loved others as I love myself. Yeah. Right. And just the call, how I advanced his kingdom. And and and I think that um we get a little too caught up in the how sitting with her too.

SPEAKER_00 25:51

I kept hearing this just come up out of the recesses of what I've been taught and just what's written on my heart. She was talking, and a few times I would hear, in him I live, and him I move, and him I have my being. Right. Doesn't matter as a mom, right? And him I live, and him I move, as a teacher, and him I live, and in my move, as a lawyer, as a secretary, as a nurse, as a as every facet, anything you can think about where you have movement towards humanity, your being should be centered on him.

SPEAKER_01 26:36

It's too good. It was too good.

SPEAKER_00 26:38

It was too good. And then in the here's, I know I want to say this. I want to be able to say this too. I am so grateful that in the inception of what we do.

SPEAKER_01 26:47

Right.

SPEAKER_00 26:47

The early days. The early days, the Lord decided because there's that thing where do people really want to hear about behavioral health from a Christian perspective? Should we be Jehovah sneaky? Should we be hiding? Does that make sense? But it has become apparent to us through who the Lord in our abiding is sending to us how we should be being. Forget what we're doing. How should we be being? I am internally grateful for that. I'm internally grateful for anybody. If you're seeing this podcast, divinely ordered. If this podcast speaks to you, divinely ordered. If you want to do a podcast, nobody gay keeps. The world needs everybody, divinely ordered. It is all an invitation for you to release.

SPEAKER_01 27:49

To rest. To rest and remain.

SPEAKER_00 27:52

And to remain in him as you engage your divine purpose for this will this world.

SPEAKER_01 28:00

Yes. If you not if you, we implore you. We in that situation. You're imploring. I'm imploring.

SPEAKER_00 28:07

That's when people implore, that's beyond an invitation.

SPEAKER_01 28:11

I want to tell you you need to, but I can't tell you. I highly suggest. I'm highly suggesting that you roll over to yvettehenry.com and you purchase a copy of this book because it will it will change you. It'll change how you function. It'll change your life. And so, and that was a plug. A plug. Heavy. Yvette Henry. Get the book.com. Get the book, YvetteHenry.com.

SPEAKER_00 28:37

Look at this shameless plug for help. We shamelessly plug mental health. We shamelessly plug the healing journey. Yes. We want you to live love and work well with yourself and others. We will advocate for it unapologetically. That's it.