Description: This week, Dr. Boogren wraps up the Sacred Rest series by presenting the final types of rest. We'll see you again in 2023!
Resources:
1. Feel inspired by Dr. Saundra Dalton-Smith's TedTalk here.
2. Order your copy of the Sacred Rest text here.
3. Finally, explore the rest of Dr. Dalton-Smith's work here.
Listen Now:
Transcription: Hi, and welcome to episode 15 of season three of Self-Care for Educators. I'm your host, Tina Boogren. This week is week three of our three part series centered around rest. As a reminder to kind of refresh your memory here, what we've been doing is digging into Dr. Dalton-Smith's incredible work around rest. As a reminder, she wrote a book called Sacred Rest: Recover Your Life. Renew Your Energy. Restore Your Sanity. And, in it she identifies these seven types of rest that we all need. And so, two weeks ago as we got this series started, we talked about physical rest and mental rest. Last week we talked about social, rest, spiritual rest, and sensory rest. And, today we're gonna dig into emotion and creative rest. So, let's start with emotional rest.
So emotional rest refers to the rest we experience when we feel like we can be real and authentic in how we share our feelings. Some of you might go, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding. This is what we talk about in our educator wellness book around emotional wellness. What we know is that many of us carry quite a bit of emotional labor privately, and that we don't share with anyone what it is that we're feeling. We might be carrying this around because we don't wanna burden anyone. It's pretty private. It might be ... It's just different for everyone. And so, you might feel like you can't show your feeling, and so instead we kind of hide them, and we don't give ourselves the opportunity to express those feelings. And, expressing those feelings is actually how we move to healing. You'll know you have a emotional rest deficit if you feel that you always have to keep your emotions in check and you never have the freedom to be truly authentic about what you're feeling.
And, to kind of tackle this, this is where what we recommend in our educator wellness book of first, we have to be aware of our emotion. And then, spend a little time reflecting and try to understand where they're coming from, and then see if we might be able to move through those. And, we talk a lot about mindful practices to help us do this, whether that's journaling, whether that's meditation, just breathing, just to going for a mindful walk. There's lots of ways for us to kind of tune into our emotions, and that's gonna help us with our emotional rest.
The final type of rest that she talks about--type seven--is creative rest. So, this is the rest we experience when we allow ourselves to appreciate beauty in any form, whether that's natural beauty like oceans, mountains, trees, or created beauty like art, music, dance. The way you can tell that you have a deficit in this area is when you have a hard time being innovative. If you feel like you're getting stuck, and you're having a hard time brainstorming, or when problem solving is difficult for you, that's a sign that you've got a deficit here. We need to remember that creativity is more than just art. It's any type of innovation we know. Gosh, there's so many ways that we can be creative. Many of you, some of you are just so incredibly creative, but the hard part is making time for this, right? So, whether that's working in your garden, maybe for some of you it's cooking, maybe it's writing, maybe it's playing music, maybe it's listening to music, it's whatever, whatever it is that you need, allowing yourself to do that. Giving yourself permission to be bad at something, starting something new, a new project, getting back, picking up your camera, and getting back into photography. Maybe it's opening that coloring book and doing some coloring. Just allowing yourselves some time for creativity.
And, I know this is hard to fit into our day, so I'm gonna remind you of a strategy we've talked about before of this idea of taking 15 minutes a day. Just yours. And to me, if we take that 15 minutes, that's a really good place for us to do something creative, not on a screen, but something that we just wish we had more time, more time for. Let's make time for it. As we think about then, those seven types of rests, let me just list them again to get them in our minds here. So, we've got physical, mental, spiritual, emotional, social, sensory, and creative. I hope that you've been able to incorporate some of these, or at least kind of brought them to the forefront of your mind over these last few weeks, and I want you to think about continuing to build on those, maybe specifically this week, digging into emotional rest and creative rest. Or revisiting all of them. Maybe you wanna go ... Maybe you wanna read her book, maybe you wanna watch her TED Talk. Whatever you do, I want you to just really think about rest, particularly right now. Again, this is a really, really challenging time of year, and some of you are getting really close, hopefully, to having a little bit of time off where I hope that you really, truly are able to rest and rejuvenate and spend time with people that you love and make some time for yourself. It's essential, absolutely essential.
Speaking of rest, what's gonna happen is I'm gonna take a couple weeks off from the podcast. I really wanna practice what I preach, and I wanna sink into two weeks here that take a little time off. And, I want you to do the same. So, I don't want you listening to, to me blabbing at you for two weeks, as well. So, two weeks are gonna be just a little short mini break and know that we'll come back to kick off the new calendar year together. But, in the meantime, lots to think about in terms of rest for for the next couple of weeks. I'm cheering so hard for you. I really want you to make that time for rest. I want you to spend a little time kind of reflecting on your celebrations for this calendar year and think of this as a chance to kind of catch our breath reset, so that we start fresh right as we go back to school and back to work in January. Feeling like we're really standing on solid ground, that we feel rejuvenated, that we feel reconnected to our why, that we feel like we've been able to tap into some sensory rest or creativity. Spend time with people that truly we just love spending time with. And, the more that we take care of ourselves, the better able we are to show up as exactly the educators that we wanna be when we go back to work.
A huge thank you is always to Brooke for making this happen. Thank you to Marzano Resources and Solution Tree for this pinch me job that I get to do, and is always a huge, huge thank you to all of you--my bad-ass Self-Care Squad. I'm cheering so hard for you. I truly want you to rest. Let's like pinky promise each other that we're gonna really, really rest and take a break and sink into the gift of time that we're about to be given and know that I can't wait to reconnect and kick off a brand new calendar year with all of you in a couple of weeks. Make it amazing you guys.
Comments