The Case for Stillness
Go, go, go. Do, do, do. Get, get, get.
That’s the energy most of us are conditioned in from birth.
Worth becomes productivity, and productivity becomes the measure of your value. If you do more, you are more. And if you aren’t striving… well, what are you even doing? Rest is something you earn, and only after you’ve done “all the work,” whatever that means.
This mindset was especially prevalent in my generation (Gen X) and remains a cornerstone of Western culture. At the same time, I’m beginning to notice small signs of a cultural shift, an increasing awareness of the cost of chronic hustle. The quiet but important questions: For what? For who? Who is actually benefiting from all this grinding and striving?
One of the many problems with this framework is that it’s deeply reductive, profoundly disembodied, and fundamentally misaligned with our wholeness. Over time, it leads to burnout, depression, and habits that numb us to the very disconnection we’re trying to outrun.
And perhaps most strikingly, this approach rarely delivers on what it promises.
Our mind–body systems are designed to move in rhythms and cycles. Sometimes that rhythm calls for effort, productivity, and forward motion. And sometimes it calls for slowing down, resting, reflecting—simply being. When we habitually override rest and slowness, we dysregulate our entire system. We lose access to meaning-making, emotional depth, and our capacity for connection, joy, wonder, and love.
This is where the magic of stillness lives.
Stillness asks nothing of you. There’s no striving, no destination, no achievement. There is only being here, now, noticing what is. That can feel deeply uncomfortable, threatening; especially if staying busy has been how you’ve survived.
The initial discomfort of stillness understandably sends many people rushing back into action.
But when stillness is practiced consistently, something shifts. Over time, your system recognizes it as a natural state. Relief emerges. You begin to feel into the fuller dimensions of who you are; separate from what you produce or accomplish. This is how we start to reclaim wholeness.
Winter, as a natural cycle, is an incredible teacher in developing a relationship with stillness. Winter embodies being rather than performing. It models quiet deepening, and restoration—not expansion, acceleration, or bloom. And perhaps most powerfully, winter reminds us how essential this rhythm is for growth itself.
Rest and reflection, when held in harmony with action and productivity, is the cycle that fuels inspiration, motivation, and meaningful engagement with the world.
So how do you begin a relationship with stillness?
Start by making peace with the fact that it will likely feel uncomfortable and maybe even pointless, at first. If you can stay with that discomfort and allow it to move through you (and it will), you’ll begin to sense the steady calm beneath all the noise.
Practically speaking, carve out 10–15 minutes a day to do nothing. (You already spend more time than that scrolling, so this isn’t about time.)
You might:
Sit and look out a window, just being.
Lie on the floor and follow the rhythm of your breath.
Stand outside and simply notice what it feels like to be in your body and with your surroundings.
Daily connection with stillness helps you recognize the cues your body is always offering. You begin to notice when you need rest, when you need a pause, and—just as importantly—when you feel genuinely ready to take action.
And yes, I hear you. The demands of life are real. Being overwhelmed and under-resourced is real.
And also, there are ways to honor your inner rhythm within the chaos of your current situation, even if it’s only 5 minutes.
It may not be perfect. It may not be ideal.
But it can be enough to reconnect you with more of who you truly are.
2023 In Review Using GLAD
Arriving at the end of another year invites us to focus on introspection and self reflection.
Rhythms and cycles are woven into every aspect of our lives, from the automatic rhythm of our breath as we inhale and exhale, to the continuous cycles of the sun, the moon and the seasons. We spend our lives entwined in these patterns, many times not exploring the power of consciously partnering with them. (And yes, this might be a teaser of a project I’m working on).
Using the end of a calendar year to reflect on your experiences of yourself and your life, the patterns, structure, choices and results, is a powerful tool for partnering with the ending and beginning of a new yearly cycle. It can also be an overwhelming exercise to consider, with thoughts similar to, “How do I review a whole year? I can’t even remember what I had for breakfast this morning.” Finding a manageable and meaningful way to begin a self reflection process can be challenging.
2023 was a transformational year for me, and even though I have developed introspective and self reflective practices for decades, I was finding that reflecting on my year in a meaningful way felt TOUGH. I kept listing events and experiences, which was helpful in acknowledging the content of the year but it wasn’t supporting my goal to find meaning.
So I pulled out an OLD mindfulness tool; one I included in the first workshop I created years ago, Mindfulness 101. The exercise is called GLAD and is significantly beneficial for general mood management and specifically depressive tendencies. The exercise as originally intended suggests that you acknowledge;
One small experience you are GRATEFUL for that day
One small thing that you LEARNED that day
One small ACCOMPLISHMENT for that day
And one small DELIGHT you experienced that day.
It’s effective when practiced consistently because it broadens your perception of your experience and opens you to notice daily experiences that bring meaning and purpose to your life. I decided to adapt it as a way to reflect on my year. I stayed with the basic approach and allowed myself to be flexible about how I described each category. If I wanted to add it more for each or wanted to summarize a category by describing a theme, then I did that. Here’s a bit of what I came up with.
This year, what I am grateful for is the grounded awareness that I can trust myself to live within my values, even when it is painful to do so. That doesn't mean I make “right” decisions, rather it means that I can trust myself to both be responsible for the decisions I make and change course when my values indicate that I need to. The grounded awareness of that trust has liberated me to take more risks and to be more vulnerable, trusting myself to care for myself no matter what the outcome.
This year, I learned that the love we offer ourselves and others as well as the love that is offered to us, is what can make the difference between surviving unexpected challenges and losses and learning, growing and thriving through those same difficulties. Love as a force, filled in the gaps when I reached my capacity, it lightened my load when I could hold no more, it witnessed with kind compassion, my grief and it preserved my connection to hope.
This year I accomplished a business restructuring to align with my current needs and I was able to make real progress on a decades long whisper in my heart, what I’ve come to refer to as a heart seed, this seed was planted during 2023 and is currently growing. It has stretched me and unsettled me and excited me. As all heart centered pursuits tend to do.
This year I delighted in gathering my first crop of dahlia seeds from my own harvest. I delighted in a few spontaneous and fun trips that made my belly ache from laughing and my feet hurt from dancing. And I delighted in a few new relationships I cultivated this year that reawakened some dormant, neglected aspects of myself that I deeply love.
If you are looking to start a relationship or perhaps deepen your relationship with New Year’s reflection, using GLAD can support you in both broadening your perspective on your year while also helping you to find meaning in your experiences this year.
Looking ahead to what is beginning; in 2024 I’m looking forward to offering a 4 part talk series aligned with each season, the first, Harnessing the Power of Winter Stillness will be offered sometime in late January. Details about the event and how to sign up are on the way!
I’m also looking forward to so many additional creative projects both within the practice and in my personal life, and as always, I’m looking forward to walking alongside many of you as you rediscover your voice and reclaim the power of using it in support of all your selves, past, present and future.
I wish each of you a new year filled with deep authentic connection to yourself and others and real moments of joy as you continue discovering and rediscovering how beautiful you are in mind body and spirit.
Relay Race Wisdom, a metaphor for intergenerational family patterns
One of my favorite activities growing up, in track and field as well as competitive swimming was the relay race.
I loved it because I had an individual stake in how our team performed AND it wasn’t just on me, there were three other team members that were also stakeholders in our overall performance; shared risk and shared victory or sometimes defeat. I can still feel the jittery excitement of that baton hitting my hand as I was starting to run and the momentum of diving off the starting block when my teammate touched the pool wall.
Because of the running and swimming events I participated in, I was often third or fourth in the lineup, so by the time it was my turn, I had some information about how we were doing and what I needed to do in my leg of the race for our team. Sometimes that meant I needed to dig deep and run/swim at the top of my skill level, sometimes that meant I had the opportunity to run/swim in my comfort zone and sometimes it meant I needed to run/swim beyond what I was consciously aware that I could do.
Family patterns across generations can be explored from a similar lens.
We are each responsible for our unique adult life AND how we experience our unique life is also connected to the folks that came before us, how they were raised, the social conditioning that influenced them, the specific aspects of identity that marginalized them and privileged them and the trauma they experienced, witnessed or were raised with.
Those factors impact not only what we each see as possible for our lives; they also impact how we see ourselves, how we think about ourselves and how we process our challenges, our opportunities and our environment in general. We can’t truly experience ourselves and our life in isolation and those folks who raised us and the folks that raised and influenced them aren’t totally responsible for our lives either.
It’s a team effort, another both/and. We both have the responsibility of creating a life that makes sense to us AND that life is influenced by those that came before us and are around us.
Doing the work to understand that shared responsibility supports us in consciously creating our lives which involves making decisions that align with our values, our hope and our dreams.
I’m at the point in my family’s evolution where I can start to evaluate how I’ve shown up “in my leg of the race”. I can see where I’ve made up some ground from the team mates before me and I’m starting to see the challenges and opportunities my children have in their own “legs of the race” because of who they are and because of how they’ve been influenced by me and other family members.
Taking responsibility in this way, I believe, continues to hold us accountable for our decisions and invites us to stay in relationship with ourselves gently and compassionately; we aren’t in charge of the whole team, just our part.
Appreciation & Gratitude
As the practice’s theme this month is appreciation, I want to take this opportunity to dive deeper into the concept of appreciation, as well as how it intersects with gratitude. Appreciation involves the awareness, recognition, enjoyment, and full sensory understanding of the positive value of something or someone. This definition shows how important mindfulness is when practicing appreciation, because in order to have a full sensory understanding of why you appreciate the value of something, you need to be mindfully present. Appreciation is a skill set that is developed with practice.
Although gratitude and appreciation are often used synonymously, there are differences between the two terms. One of the most defining characteristics of appreciation is that it is a mindful action, felt in your body with sensory awareness. Appreciation is connected to sounds, smells, things we see that we find pleasurable, and the practice of appreciation connects us with this sensory data in our body. Gratitude is a perceptual habit built on the felt sense of appreciation, when practicing gratitude, you are connecting with the felt sense awareness of appreciation in your body and utilizing that to “think” about how to perceive your experience with a grateful lens.
When beginning to develop a conscious relationship with appreciation a great place to start is self-appreciation. If you find that it can be difficult to cultivate appreciation for others, part of that may be due to the need for cultivating self-appreciation. So often appreciation and gratitude are talked about in the context of feeling positive in regard to someone else, or something someone does for you, but those same principles can be applied to yourself. An exercise that can help begin the path of self-appreciation is when you find yourself with a moment to think at the end of the day, ask yourself, “What do I feel proud of today?” and “How do I experience the felt sense of that pride in my body? Is it warm? Tingly? Where is the warmth?”. Just like self-appreciation, appreciation of others is practiced similarly. Allow yourself some time to think of an event that day involving someone else like, a family member helping with the cooking that day, a friend buying you coffee, or even the bus arriving on time. These are all great calls to cultivate a sense of appreciation. Focus on the sensations of the appreciation, using sight, sound, smell, taste and touch as your guide. Appreciation of others can also be practiced by making it a priority to acknowledge when you feel appreciative of someone in the moment. It is important to remember that this action is a parallel to the personal appreciation exercises in that, highlighting specifics of why you are feeling that appreciation will help foster a deeper and more meaningful relationship with that person.
By regularly practicing appreciation you are allowing yourself to become more connected with what fuels gratitude. Because, once you have a felt sense of appreciation in your body, you can use that to consciously develop the mental habit of using a gratitude framework to pair appreciation with your perception of your experiences, both positive and challenging. Improved understanding of mindful appreciation also benefits your ability to stay connected in the present moment, even in discomfort. When you practice maintaining awareness of what you appreciate in your life you are also building a framework for your brain to stay in the moment and increasing your distress tolerance skills, which can also foster gratitude. Practicing appreciation and developing your understanding of gratitude not only yields benefits of positive feelings and increased optimism within yourself and others, but also has several health enhancing impacts on your mental health as well. Additional benefits related to practicing appreciation include reduced stress levels, increased life satisfaction, lowers the chance of experiencing burnout, improved sleep, lowers levels of cellular inflammation, improves resiliency, increased prosocial behaviors, strengthens relationships, and encourages the development of patience, humility, and wisdom. Ultimately, continuing to develop a conscious connection with appreciation will build a bridge to the practice of gratitude; which can measurably improve your relationship with yourself, your life and with other people.
Mindset Obstacles to Rest & Play
When I was in graduate school pursuing my masters degree in clinical social work, I was also working, doing a field placement for my degree and raising two small kids on my own. Needless to say, my plate was OVER FULL. Many times I would find myself overwhelmed with papers due and exhausted.
At those intersections, I'd often share with my then partner about how tired I was and how I “needed to just pull another all nighter and get through it,” that I “couldn’t afford the time to sleep.” He’d very kindly and gently remind me in those moments that when I supported myself in getting a full, restful night’s sleep I’d often wake up with an intuitive approach to a paper or project and more energy and focus to get it done.
Even though there was a part of me that knew this was true, that understood why it was true, I still often resisted his suggestion. My resistant thoughts usually took the form of “I’m behind where I should be in my life, so I can’t” or “As long as I have papers and projects due, I shouldn’t rest or play.” I could only consider those as options when all “my stuff” was done.
Of course, none of that is rational or reasonable, but it sure did feel challenging to choose to care for myself, to choose a good night’s sleep, to choose an afternoon of fun when my kids were gone and I was off work, because well, that was prime no distraction time. Inevitably, I regretted the times I pushed myself too hard and appreciated when I allowed moments and pockets of rest and enjoyment because they replenished my spirit and restored my focus.
As I dug deeper into that mindset I realized it was based in worth, and specifically a hierarchy of worth. If I could demonstrate that I was worthy, ie, I had all my ducks in a straight row, then I deserved rest and fun, if I didn’t have those ducks lined up, no rest or fun for me. It was a sophisticated system of denying my humanity and fusing my worth with productivity, which is a recipe for loneliness and burnout. At the core, it was a conditional relationship with worthiness, or what Brene Brown means when she says, “We are hustling for our worthiness.”
Rest and play are essential aspects of our lives. When we rest, our minds and bodies detox and refuel, our body literally takes out the cellular “trash” and works to optimize our system for the next day. Similarly, our brains consolidate memories and learning, offload stress and repair important structures and functions.
When we allow ourselves to have fun, we diminish our allostatic load, a fancy way of saying we reduce our stress quite a bit. When we are laughing and doing activities we enjoy, alone and with others, we connect to our creativity, we broaden our lens of possibility and we reinforce hope.
So how can you begin to open up to a deeper relationship with rest and play?
Start by noticing and identifying the resistant thoughts about rest and enjoyment in your life. As you begin to notice them, a theme will likely emerge. Common themes are worthiness and belonging. We aren’t worthy so we don’t deserve a break or we are inherently damaged so we don’t belong to the group who can rest and enjoy life. Sometimes both themes appear, or other themes similar in nature arise.
Once you have insight into the theme of resistance you can mindfully reframe your thoughts and develop baby step action plans. For example, if the theme is centered in your unworthiness a resistant thought may be something like; I still have important work on my to-do list so I can’t take a break. In that moment, breathe and kindly shift that thought to something like; resting is important and allows me to replenish my energy, there will always be important things on my to-do list. This type of reframe works because it doesn’t ignore that you have competing priorities to manage. It acknowledges the importance of prioritizing rest to SUPPORT you in navigating your other priorities.
Additionally, taking a baby step approach toward rest and play helps you to manage the inherent discomfort involved in changing patterns. We feel comfort in the familiar so small incremental changes can often feel more manageable.
Allowing yourself 30 minutes to chat with a treasured friend, choosing a 15 minute break for some herbal tea, watching the movie you’ve been wanting to see for “awhile now”, are steps that allow you to practice choosing rest and play without experiencing overwhelming stress and anxiety. Over time you can build your rest and play muscles up to increase the time and opportunities to benefit from these restorative practices until they become a part of each day and a consistent practice that affirms you are enough exactly as you are, you are worthy of fun and rest and you belong.
Do You Have A Generous Mindset?
Do you have a generous mindset?
And really, does it even matter if you do?
Typically, generosity is thought of as how much are you directly giving to others in money and time. Are you donating to causes that you care about? Are you helping a friend by offering your time to listen or to help out with a specific task? If you answered yes to those, then you probably consider yourself to be generous.
...Is that the same as having a generous mindset though?
What I’m referencing as a generous mindset is a little deeper and less concrete (surprising coming from me, right?!) While a generous mindset may include giving financial assistance or giving your time to someone you care about, it's also about the lens or perspective you are applying to yourself and others’ in the experiences you find yourself in. A generous mindset is the framing you place around something or someone. This framing can take the shape of judgement, criticism, opposition, generosity, acceptance, understanding and empathy. It can also vary depending on who’s involved and what the circumstance is at the moment.
A generous mindset matters because it assists you in cultivating safe connection with yourself and others. Giving yourself and others the benefit of the doubt or generosity of intent allows you to stay present, reducing a fight or flight response and increasing empathy, compassion and curiosity, all of which are correlated with resiliency and general satisfaction levels in relationships. So in short, we want a generous mindset; it’s a valuable approach to life and relationships.
How exactly can you figure out what mindset is your default and how to develop more of a generous mindset. I’m going to outline a few key strategies to start you on your way to more generosity for yourself and those around you so you can begin experiencing a deeper connection both with yourself and with others:
Notice key internal dialogue phrases in response to unexpected outcomes? These may be phrases like “Of course she didn't follow through”(insert an eye roll with this one) or “Something probably came up, I’ll check in with her about my offer later”. These thoughts, when approached with curiosity can reveal habits of mindset.
Notice the stories you tell yourself to fill in the blanks as a situation is unfolding. These take the form of “He did that because he doesn’t care about me” or “I’m not sure why he did that but wow, that hurt” Noticing how you fill in the blanks, assigning intent to others actions is a wellspring of important information about your perceptual habits.
Notice if your internal dialogue and the stories you create disconnect you from yourself and others or help you to stay present and curious?
If you notice that your mindset tends toward judgement and criticism you can move toward a more generous mindset by:
Practicing acceptance and compassion. When you notice a mistake or misstep by you or someone else, substitute the fault finding and judgement “Everyone makes mistakes, how can I support myself or them in managing this”.
Responding with open curiosity, as opposed to assigning malicious intent when you notice you are offended by someone's words or actions, for example “I wonder what they are trying to communicate, let me follow up with them so we don’t create a misunderstanding.”
Considering how good you feel when you show up for others that matter to you and extend that opportunity to those around you that are emotionally available. If you are the type of person that instead finds themselves thinking thoughts like, “No one can help me, they don’t care” or “I don’t want to bother them with my needs”.
Learning to cultivate a generous mindset toward yourself and others allows you to deepen the joy you experience in connection not only with yourself but within ALL of your relationships. A generous mindset supports healthy communication, it helps to resolve conflicts and it improves our sense of deep belonging, all of which serve as protective factors for our mental and physical health.
Fireflies, Fear, & Freedom
Summer nights, when I was a kid, were filled with magic. Mainly so, because there wasn’t school, so that meant a later bedtime. It was light out waaaay after dinner, which meant a neighborhood kickball game until the street lights went on.
...And the grand finale of summer nights was the firefly show.
It always began the same way;
First a popsicle, then either a lawn chair or blanket, right in the center of our backyard, (because that was definitely the best seat in the house) and then watch and wait.
Before long the show would begin, it would build slowly, a little glow on the left, then another, then three or four in unison in front of me and before long it was a captivating light show that seemed to fill our entire backyard with magic and wonder. There was no predicting its start, the duration, amount, or the beautiful light patterns that were created night after night.
Anything seemed possible witnessing them, magic definitely seemed real.
Inevitably, I’d want to capture the magic for myself, which led to jars, strategies and hunting them. The more, the better. I generally caught some, and you know what. I almost immediately lost interest in them once they were trapped by me. They seemed listless, the glow was definitely dimmed, the magic all but gone.
Years later as an adult, I wondered about fear and freedom, where magic is and where magic goes to die, both in our individual lives and in our relationships. I thought about the fireflies again, realizing that for me, what motivated me to capture the fireflies was fear.
Fear of not having access to magic, fear of not understanding the beauty of freedom.
In acting from that fear, by trying to “capture the magic”, I actually robbed myself and them of the magic that is inherent in all of us when we are living in alignment with ourselves, our spirit, our purpose. What they offered in their authenticity and what died when I tried to contain and control it is the magic. Witnessing that magic in their freedom could model for me the power of witnessing my own authenticity, which actually is the way to move beyond fearful reactions.
It reminded me once again, of the wisdom in,
Let it come.
Let it be.
Let it go.
Within myself related to goals, interests, pursuits and in relationships with others. Staying grounded in the magic of flow, whether something is arriving or leaving, is always where the magic is at.
Meeting Yourself Where You Are: A Powerlifter's Story
Taking a deep breath, I was trying to prevent myself from crying. An immense pain was shooting through the inner part of my leg.
“I’m fine. You’re fine.” I kept repeating to myself in a futile attempt to calm myself down.
Something was wrong and I was not fine. I was in the middle of a training session for powerlifting and worked up to my top set. Once I attempted my top set- which should have moved fairly well- it didn’t even budge. Rather, a sharp pain began in my leg.
Little did I know this sharp pain was the beginning of a long journey.
Just a couple months out from my first powerlifting meet where I planned to qualify for nationals by receiving a specified total of weight lifted from squat, bench and deadlift, I was now considering dropping out. The pain in my leg turned out to be a significant strain of one of my adductors, causing it to be very difficult for me to squat and nearly impossible to deadlift. Now unable to do these two lifts that I was depending on to qualify for nationals, I was struggling to dial down my training and meet myself where I was.
I told myself that this pain was not really an injury and would go away in a few days after some extra foam rolling and hot yoga sessions.
Boy was I wrong.
Things only went downhill the more I denied things.
Finally, I decided to come to terms with the fact that I did, in fact, have an injury and I could not just make it go away by ignoring it.
I had to actually meet myself where I was at and take care of myself. That mindset ended up being a game changer.
Meeting myself where I was involved a carefully calculated integrative approach of mindfulness based self care, nutrition, aromatherapy and physical care.
I began with being mindful of my body and it’s needs. If I went to the gym to train one day and my leg was in pain, I would reduce how much I was doing for that workout. To the contrary, if I went to the gym and my leg felt a little better- a rare but phenomenal feeling- I took it and ran with it, figuratively speaking. On the good days I would push myself a little bit more, but not to the point where my leg would hurt. Simultaneously, I incorporated specific exercises into my training sessions to strengthen my adductors without further straining them.
Avoiding stretching, because it would worsen the strain, it became a consistent self discipline practice for me to foam roll every single day. Foam rolling helped to loosen my muscles and increase my range of motion. One day, I even got a deep tissue massage. Which, LET ME TELL YOU. That deep tissue massage worked wonders on not only my injured adductor, but my whole entire body.
Incorporated into my integrative care routine to heal my adductor was the utilization of essential oils. A few times a week I would take a hot bath with epsom salt, peppermint or deep blue, marjoram, rhoman chamomile and lavender oil. Lavender and marjoram oils would promote relaxation. Peppermint, deep blue and roman chamomile oils each have properties that aid in muscle recovery and the epsom salt aided my body in detoxification.
Yoga, also played a huge role in my journey of meeting myself where I was. Ironically, I had to stop practicing yoga, because of the strain it placed on my adductor, but the meditative, mindset and breathing aspects of yoga carried over for me. Being mindful of my body and listening to it, things I learned from yoga, intensely helped me with my lifting, and life in general, while being injured.
Being injured and also being cognizant of needing to take care of myself caused me to step up my nutrition. Already I ate very well- mostly whole foods that were unprocessed, but being injured I knew that I needed to fuel maximal recovery for optimal results. To be completely honest and transparent with you, I have quite the sweet tooth.
Especially when it comes to cookies.
During this time period I would allow myself to have a couple of gluten free cookies (I have a gluten sensitivity) every couple of weeks, but overall I steered clear of sugars. Primarily I ate veggies (LOTS of veggies), fruits, chicken, turkey burger and tuna. Maybe not the most appealing diet to some people, this micro and macro nutrient packed diet plan maximally fueled my training sessions while aiding recovery from workouts and my injury.
All in all, this was a situation that threatened my ability to even compete for a few months, but with a growth mindset and meeting myself where I was I ended up being able to compete and receive first place in both my weight class and age class for my powerlifting meet.
Taking the time to take care of yourself is always worth it. Even if you do not achieve certain ideals that you expected, you will learn so much more about yourself and develop a deeper connection with yourself and others.
Haley Mills
Instagram: @theliftingtater