EXPERIENCE REST

How we care for ourselves shapes how we are able to respond to others.

A free monthly online gathering offering guided experiences of rest as a simple, direct response to the stress, overwhelm, trauma, vicarious trauma, and burnout we encounter in our work and our lives.

Featuring guided rest, nervous system support, and live handpan music. 

This offering may be especially supportive for community members, clinicians, educators, counselors, outreach workers, public health staff, public service professionals caregivers, youth-serving professionals, and others impacted or supporting individuals impacted by violence and trauma.

Resting with Youth: The Rest Clinic Youtube Channel

This work exists as a response to two foundational experiences:

1. As a community, across age, race, culture, class and gender, we are collectively grappling with trauma and exhaustion for many reasons.

2. As a community, the majority of us are interested in feeling better and we desire to create a better world. 

We propose that rest is a powerful pathway toward healing trauma, restoring our energy and health, and creating the world we want to live in. Rest replenishes the biological and psychological systems of the body/mind. Rest is key in the process of healing trauma. Rest is a vital aspect of the creative process that can be seen in nature’s rhythms, as well as human’s process of creativity. 

We acknowledge that trauma, chronic stress, and the demands of the world can make accessing rest nearly impossible. Even if we do find the time to rest, our nervous systems may struggle to enter a truly restful state. We are rarely taught about rest or encouraged to prioritize it. When we do not know how to, or are not given permission to, create periods of rest, we miss the opportunity to access the full potential of our creative process individually and collectively. The creative process is foundational to how ideas are developed and implemented across all fields, whether in the arts, humanities, STEM, public service, business, entrepreneurship, or beyond.

We invite the youth, families, leaders, artists, teachers, learners and healers of our community to:

• Gently learn about rest and its complexities on an individual, communal, national, global and historical level. 

• Acknowledge the ways in which we struggle to rest

• Explore different ways to practice rest throughout the day and week

• Consider the implications that our inability to rest is having not just on our own health and stability, but on our creative process, our families, our organizations creative potential, and ultimately those that we serve and love.

We offer gentle, engaging, creative, in-person and online rest-based programming that serves rest to people of all ages: both kids and adults.