When rest isn’t enough

If you’re anything like me, you’ve had that year.
The one that fills you to the brim, tests your capacity, expands it, and tests it again.

You’re finding ways to take care of all aspects of your life, but you feel like you’re perpetually just barely making it.
Even though you’re delivering exactly what you said you would. I’ve learned to call these “superhero in training” years.
You are constantly running on some version of fumes, making it just in the nick of time while severely stretched.

Mine were the years of attending a counseling graduate program while working full-time.

The problem, I thought, was that I was spending way too much of my day in front of a screen, usually seated.
My physical therapist joked that I was training for the "Desk Olympics." My movement consisted of commute-walks and the occasional yoga class. It wasn't nearly enough to help me process the sheer volume of material my being was taking in.

I realized that my body didn't just need to be soothed, rested, and reset. It needed to release.

Enter a wild thought: picking up rowing. Not a cute boat on a lake kind of rowing. Not serene.
Not kayaking or stand-up paddleboarding. Olympic rowing.

Why, might you ask? 5:20 AM practice times, full-body intensity, and a sharp learning curve.

If you are wired like me, you understand immediately. For the uninitiated, the high intensity and endurance were the available way my subconscious could work out the wild transformation that life in tech and grad school had brought forth.

The gold in this choice was meeting a part of myself that I had always used as fuel for achievement, but had never stopped to support. Years later, rowing teaches me, feeds me, and grows me. It taught me to listen closely to the animal of my body, the host to so many parts of me, and showed me what a powerful resource we have access to when we finally tune in.

But the real gold in that "wild choice" wasn't just the rowing. It was the realization that for years, I had been trying to solve for sustainability by treating myself like a machine that needed better maintenance. I was looking for ways to recover faster so I could keep performing. Rest and refuel, so I could keep going.

I was trying to optimize my coping, and my compartmentalization; rather than shifting towards a possibility of wholeness.

What the water taught me is that wholeness isn’t a state you optimize your way into. It emerges when you stop managing the separate parts of yourself, the achiever, the superhero, the exhausted human, and start creating conditions for them to come back together.

It turns out that the part of me that needed to release, to be in the body, and to touch that intensity, wasn't a distraction from my success. It was the missing piece of it.

If you are currently deep in a "superhero in training" year, running on a fraction of who you are, know this:

You don't need a boat to reconnect to yourself (although, a single scull is a great idea).
Your "wild choice" might not be a 5:20 AM high-intensity practice. For you, that might just be another drain on a system that is already giving everything to a very full life.

You get to choose the shape and the sturdiness of the container that suits you.

It might be blissful absolute silence before the house wakes up, hands in the soil, playing an instrument, or a slow walk where you actually feel your feet on the ground as your content settles a bit.

I found a deep richness in the practice itself.
In the simple, devoted act of coming back to yourself, however imperfectly it happens.

But here is what I also learned. The container is just the invitation.

When I finally listened and reconnected to myself, what arose wasn’t instant peace.

I had the benefit of a counseling program and training to support the volumes of content that had been waiting to be heard, revealing what had been hurting for some time. I learned that this is not a road well traveled alone.

Navigating and learning to hold the full spectrum of your experience without fragmenting again is the real work.
It is a deep practice, not a quick fix. And you don't have to do it alone.

This is the heart of somatic and relational work. Not optimizing, not fixing. Coming back into contact with yourself, and having someone alongside you who can hold what surfaces. It's what I do with the people I work with, individually and in couples.

We just have to invite the rest of you back into the room.

Petra Gojun is a somatic and relational coach working with individuals and couples in Alameda, CA and remotely.
Learn more at petragojun.com