Reflection: The art of sitting down in the boat

What happens when the mind wants you to keep moving forward, but the body is asking you to slow down?

In this episode, we reflect on rest, resistance, and why continuously ignoring ourselves is the very thing that keeps you stuck. And why listening brings you closer to who you truly are.

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Welcome to the Nellegne Stadius podcast. Here we will explore fear, patterns, and what is meant to lead yourself through life. Why is it so hard to slow down when all we want is to push more in order to believe that we are moving forward? I asked on my Instagram for you to share what you are currently going through and it was a person they wrote to rest with big letters and then said that the mind just wants to move forward and push but the soul is asking for me to sit still in the boat. And I thought that reference was very good because it's very true to have that ambition and what you want to do, but the body is tired, it wants to rest. Because when you slow down, what's required of you is to be able to sit with what the body would like you to look at. It can also be that you're feeling that your worth is tied to being productive. Feeling that if I slow down, I don't get the movement that I need. It will just push me further away from what I actually want. I need to keep on going. But if you don't stop in the moment when your body is telling you something, that feeling will come back again and again and again until you are ready to look at it. Because the body is telling you that information that we have just received from the outside world needs to be integrated. We need to sit with it, we need to feel grief, we need to let those tears out. Or we need to scream in a pillow. Those things need to happen in order for you to move forward. Sitting with the belief of if I continue to ignore it, I continue not letting my emotions up, then I save time. I save time for me to move faster forward. But in reality, you're just slowing yourself down. Because those things will, even if you don't want to, they will show in another present. They can show up as an addiction, they can show up as an irritation, they can show up as a habit that you don't like. Because when the body don't get heard, you get physical symptoms. When I was going through a very hard relationship, my body was refusing the situation that was happening. I was trying to ignore my body, because I believed that that was not where the focus needed to be. When I went to the doctor, they were giving me medicine for what my current physical symptoms were. But in reality, what was the problem wasn't my physical symptoms, it was the psychological and emotional situation that I was in that was making me receive these symptoms. Because once I came out of that situation, all of those symptoms were gone. And the importance of accepting to rest is that you're also learning your body to know you can trust me. You can trust that I listen to you whenever you need me to. And it becomes a denial, living in the feeling of I'm fine while your whole body is refusing anything. Why do you get tired? Because you push too hard. Why do you get exhausted? Because you're continuously putting yourself in situations that do not function with how you function. And what does it mean to rest? Well, that is different for everyone. The way you rest may not be the same as someone else. But rest is not sitting by the computer closing off the world. It can if you initially feel that the body relaxes. But if you come back to the same stage, that was not rest. That was just a distraction from the rest that your body actually was telling you about. What do you think would happen if you take a moment and you lay down without any distractions, without any music, and you just lay there and look up in the ceiling without any expectations? Will the body want you to stand up and move? Probably. Or you want to take up your phone and look at a distraction. Because it's easier than to just sit completely still. Because that moment is vernible. It requires you to actually stop. And that is scary. It's scary to allow the feelings to come up. But let's say you start crying over something that happened to you, that wouldn't make you feel more sad. You would feel more relief. Because getting that out of the body is what it's telling you to do. Because if you go on with your day and you tell yourself, I do that later, what you're doing unconsciously is that you take that layer that just exists in your life, maybe an annoying colleague or a friend of yours that you were not agreeing with. You take that layer and you put it on top of everything else that is happening around you. And what's happening is that every time you do that, you add another layer. And all of a sudden you created a big giant onion. It may be small from the beginning, but it grows bigger. And inside this onion is a seed. It's that green sprout in the middle. And that is you. How would you believe that you can reach this core and act from that core to give yourself the best circumstances if all of those layers that you ignored are put on top? If you have a busy day and you feel this anger, irritation or grief coming up from something that happened and you allow yourself to take time during the day when you it's on the way up, not later at night when it comes up. Cause it's better than stuffing it on top of all of those other layers. Cause in the long term of your life, do you think that it would be better for you to create all of those layers or to give yourself that time when the body is telling you to? Yes, maybe that rest is one week, maybe that rest is one year of searching for different paths that would align with what you want to create, or what's true for you. Then that time is more important and will bring you closer than to continuously avoiding your body. So that rest that you're seeking is not actually there to hurt you. It feels fearful because it's requiring something from you that maybe you're not used to doing. But you're allowed to feel the feelings. The bravest thing that you can do isn't to push forward. It's to stop arguing with the body where you are right now. Because the moment you stop fighting reality is the moment that you create energy to move again.