Rest – Creating some space around the writing process

As we emerge from the holiday season, if you created a time of rest and rejuvenation, you may be feeling energized and full of new ideas. This is rest at work in the writing process. Rest is the conduit for a well-spring of ideas and it allows us to enter into a new beginning within the writing process.

Rest is not necessarily sleeping; it is just not writing. The goal of this stage is to allow your mind to rest, to create room for new ideas, connections, and create space to allow the solutions to come up for you.

Have you ever noticed how you can feel frustrated with a word, sentence or paragraph and you decide to walk away from your writing for a little while and when you come back  whatever you were looking for comes more easily? This is how rest works. It creates space around the writing to allow the ideas to flow in. Without rest, we can get stuck, have high resistance and low flow.

As with each stage of the writing process, rest has its shadow. When we get stuck in rest we may have feelings of laziness, apathy, pleasure-seeking and procrastination.

You may consider these 3 strategies to incorporate rest into your writing process:

• Notice where and when you have “a-ha” moments in a resting state e.g. the shower, walks in nature, so that you can create opportunities for them on purpose
• Notice whether you work to exhaustion and how you might use rest to best serve you during the writing process. For e.g. create habits to ensure that you rest throughout the process instead of succumbing to binge and bust cycles. 
• Notice whether you take breaks too easily, i.e. procrastinating, and consider how you might support yourself to use rest more effectively to complete your writing projects. For e.g.understand your compelling reason to write and refer to it when it’s time to get started.

If you find yourself exhausted from writing or often procrastinating about your writing, I would encourage you to email me at support@melissaeanders.com for a complimentary Discovery Call.

I would love to learn more about what’s coming up for you and we can see whether the work I do is a good fit for you.

Looking forward to connecting with you!

Sincerely,
Melissa