The Drill Sergeant and the Nudge

On learning to rest without the guilt

I’ve never been very good at rest. I like to think I’m deeply connected to my body, that I always know what it wants and what it needs at any given moment. But the truth is that I’m still figuring that out. And the harder truth is that my struggle with rest isn’t some habit I picked up along the way. It’s in my bones.

When I trace it back across my own lifetime, I keep landing on the fact that I started working part-time jobs while I was still in high school. There was something so liberating about it, knowing I could spend my time working, learning new things, and making my own money. Growing up an only child, always surrounded by adults, I remember wanting to rush into adulthood. Or did I want to rush into it? When I really sit with the question, I’m not sure it was a want at all. Maybe the circumstances I was in just made rushing the only way through, and I’ve been calling it a choice ever since.

I guess not wanting to be where you are is good fuel. It keeps you pushing and it keeps you going. I was so ready to evolve out of the life I was handed and choose my own that I never stopped to ask what all that pushing was costing me. I didn’t even have a name for it until my thirties, when I finally learned the words: survival mode. I had been so busy surviving that I never clocked survival mode as a thing at all, something you could be stuck inside, something that gets quietly passed down from one generation to the next until someone finally notices they’re still running from something that stopped chasing them a long time ago.

So, burnout, more often than I’d like to admit. I’ve always called myself an empath, the one who takes on other people’s weight, who wants to help, who listens, who fixes. Where did that come from? Probably from having to figure so much of it out on my own. I’m wildly sensitive to anyone who feels left out or alone, because I know that place from the inside, and I can spend a startling amount of energy tending to how everyone around me feels. And here is the thing I keep circling back to: that instinct is the same one that makes rest so hard. The reflex to hold space for everyone else is the exact reflex that forgets to hold any for me.

Maybe that’s why I fell in love with yoga. Someone else built a space where I could take off the masks, stop playing the roles, and quit managing whether every person in the room was comfortable and happy and content. On the mat, I could just be whoever the fuck I wanted to be, and the chatter in my head finally went quiet. That’s why I love teaching, too. It’s a way of handing that same liberation to someone else. But this is my mea culpa, my little confession, because the more I give, the easier it is to tune myself out completely. That’s the achilles heel. Giving until there’s nothing left of me, and then calling it generosity.

And here is the quiet irony I’ve been avoiding. The mat was the one of the first places I ever really found myself, and somewhere in the last couple of years, teaching slowly took the place of practicing. I’m on my mat more than ever now, but almost always at the front of the room, holding it for everyone else. My own practice, the whole reason I came to any of this, has thinned out to almost nothing without my really noticing. I’ve been so busy pouring the water that I forgot I was the well. And it started long before the mat. I spent my whole childhood in a hurry to grow up and now I catch myself running the other way, chasing the kid I skipped right past. Trying to let him breathe again. More naps. More play. More fun. Maybe that's what the rest is really for, not just to recover from all the pushing, but to give that kid the room I never did.

Which brings me to why all of this is on my mind right now. I over-extended myself these last few days, and the Universe, as it always does, handed me my ass and humbled me. Four classes last week. Not enough sleep. Lifting heavier at the gym, squeezing in cardio, riding a high-stress project at my day job, and a weekend packed wall to wall. Monday came around and I came down with a gnarly cough and a bronchitis diagnosis to match. And still, even then, I spent the day convinced I could teach class that night. That I could push through.

Then something shifted. Instead of just obeying the loudest voice in my head, I noticed there were two of them, and for once I got to sit back and listen to them argue it out. The drill sergeant went first, the way it always does.

The drill sergeant: You can’t give up class tonight. The group is counting on you. You never miss. You’re the one who always shows up, who always follows through.

The nudge: You just walked out of the doctor’s office with a bronchitis diagnosis. You’re exhausted and the cough won’t quit. You’re allowed to be human.

The drill sergeant: But if I rest now, what does that make me?

The nudge: Someone who might actually get better. Keep pushing and you’ll miss far more classes when this turns into something worse. I nudged you on Saturday, you know. You just didn’t listen.

The drill sergeant: You’re right. I surrender. I’ll give up the class and rest.

So I subbed out my class. I laid on the couch, put on Netflix, and took a nap while my internal drill sergeant had a full-blown out-of-body experience watching me do it. It’s Wednesday now, and I felt good enough to teach this morning.

I don’t know where the chase comes from, the optimization and the performance and the need to be perfect. But I do know that every so often these two sides of me sit down and argue it out, and weirdly, I’m grateful there’s a conversation at all. I think I have yoga to thank for that, for making me aware there was ever a dialogue to hear in the first place. Before, there was only the drill sergeant shouting. So now I’m working on living in the grey, on catching the quiet nudges of my body and soul underneath the loud, certain voice of the drill sergeant. I’m not good at it yet, but I’m getting better.

Part of what I think the nudge is asking is simpler than rest, and harder. It’s asking me to get back on my own mat. Not to teach from it, not to hold it for a room, but to practice on it the way I did before any of this was a business, back when it was just me, my breath, and no one to take care of but myself. That's the kid I keep circling back to, really — the one who moved for the fun of it, before movement ever had a point. If teaching is how I give the quiet away, then practicing is how I get it back. I can’t keep offering people a well I’ve stopped drinking from.

Martha Beck writes about this in her book The Way of Integrity in a way that has stuck with me. She points out that integrity has almost nothing to do with being good, and everything to do with being whole. The word shares a root with integer, something undivided and intact. To live with integrity, in her telling, is just to close the gap between what you know to be true and how you actually live. Which means every time the drill sergeant wins and the nudge loses, I’m not failing some test of goodness. I’m just living a little divided from myself.

She has this other image I keep coming back to, about how a plane one degree off course ends up hundreds of miles from where it meant to land. The hopeful version is that the reverse is true, too. You don’t have to blow up your whole life to change its direction. You can steer it back with a series of one-degree turns. Cancelling one class to rest. Saying no to the invitation out. Closing the laptop when you know you're tapped out. Getting on your own yoga mat and being led by another teacher. Listening to the nudge on a Saturday instead of waiting until a Monday illness forces the issue. None of it looks like much on the day it happens. But I’m starting to think that’s exactly the point.

These are the truths I’m trying to remind myself of. That staying still is not the same as being stuck. That not producing is not the same as being unproductive. That giving until I’m depleted doesn’t earn me a gold star. That if I can’t show up for myself, I can’t really show up for anyone else.

I told you I’ve never been very good at rest, and I’m still not. But I’m learning to hear the subtle nudge and question the drill sergeant, before the Universe has to shout, and to let stillness be something other than a failure.

So I’ll hand you the same question I keep asking myself:

How do you rest, without the guilt?