02/14/2026
The Holy Permission to Slow Down.
This is a love letter to the weary, the striving, and the ones who secretly know there must be more than this
My dear friend,
I want to speak to the part of you that is tired. Not the kind of tired that sleep fixes, but the kind of tired that settles into your bones; the kind that comes from carrying a life that never seems to loosen its grip on you. The kind of tired that whispers, in quiet moments you rarely allow yourself to have, This cannot be what I was made for.
Because somewhere along the way, without ceremony and without consent, you were handed a script. It told you that your worth would be measured by your productivity; that your safety would be secured by your accumulation; that your identity would be proven by your exhaustion. Do more. Earn more. Acquire more. Become more. And if you ever stopped moving, even for a moment, you risked becoming nothing.
So you kept going. You woke up early, even when your body begged for mercy. You carried responsibilities that never seemed to end. You traded hours of your life for currency that barely covered the cost of continuing to exist inside a system that demanded your constant output just to remain afloat within it. And you told yourself this was normal. You told yourself this was life. But your nervous system knew the truth. Your nervous system has been keeping score.
As a coach and pastoral counselor, I sit with people every day whose bodies are sounding alarms their minds have been trained to ignore. Anxiety. Chronic fatigue. Irritability. Emotional numbness. A quiet, persistent grief with no obvious source. These are not personal failures. These are biological signals.
The human nervous system was not designed for perpetual urgency. It was designed for rhythm; for cycles; for work and for rest; for engagement and for stillness; for purpose and for presence. But what many of us are living inside now is a state of chronic activation, a low-grade emergency that never fully resolves. We have been taught to override our own internal signals in service to external expectations, and we have done it for so long that rest itself has begun to feel uncomfortable, even suspicious.
There was a time when rest was woven into the fabric of life, not as a reward, not as an indulgence, but as a natural and necessary part of being human. Now rest has become something we must justify. We schedule it. We ration it. We apologize for it. We call it laziness when we cannot explain its productivity. We have been conditioned to believe that stillness must produce something in order to be valid. But the most important things stillness produces cannot be measured: peace, clarity, healing, connection, remembrance. Remembrance of who you were before the world told you who you needed to be.
We have been told a story about independence, especially women. We were told that independence would free us, and in many ways it has. It has given women voice, choice, and agency where there was once limitation and confinement. But what was never fully acknowledged is that independence inside a system that still demands constant productivity simply means carrying more weight alone.
Now many households require two nervous systems under chronic strain just to survive. Two people working. Two people exhausted. Children raised inside institutions for most of their waking hours. Families living in proximity to one another, but rarely in true presence with one another.
Children, too, have inherited the script. From the moment they are old enough to participate, they are placed onto the same moving conveyor belt. Perform. Achieve. Produce. Prepare. Prepare for a future that will ask even more of them. And somewhere in the brief space between childhood wonder and adult obligation, their nervous systems begin to learn what ours learned: that rest is unsafe, that stillness is wasteful, that their value must be proven.
I want to tell you something that may feel radical. Doing nothing is not nothing.
Some of the most important moments of my life have happened when I appeared, from the outside, to be doing absolutely nothing at all; sitting barefoot in the grass, watching the wind move through the trees like breath moving through lungs, listening to birds speak to one another in a language older than human urgency, feeling the sun rest gently on my skin asking nothing of me in return.
In those moments, I am not empty. I am full. Full of presence. Full of awareness. Full of God. Because God does not live only inside productivity. God lives inside stillness, inside silence, inside the spaces where you finally stop long enough to notice that you are alive.
Creation itself does not hurry. The trees do not apologize for growing slowly. The river does not rush in panic toward its destination. The deer that steps carefully from the hedgeline does not measure its worth by how much it accomplished before sunset. And yet it is fully alive. Fully present. Fully enough.
This is the part that can be difficult to accept. The system that benefits from your exhaustion will never be the one that gives you permission to rest, because your exhaustion sustains it. Your constant striving sustains it. Your belief that you must earn your right to exist sustains it. So the permission must come from somewhere else.
It must come from you.
It must come from the quiet voice inside you that has never fully agreed with the pace you were handed; the voice that whispers when you step outside, slow down; the voice that speaks when you watch the sky change colors at dusk, this matters too; the voice that reminds you, gently but persistently, you are not here only to produce. You are here to live.
Whether we speak through the language of neuroscience, emotional healing, or Scripture, the truth remains the same. The human soul requires rest, not as an occasional escape, but as a regular returning.
In coaching, we help people regulate their nervous systems. In counseling, we help people process the weight they were never meant to carry alone. In ministry, we help people remember their original design. None of these paths lead to more striving. They lead to more alignment. They lead to more presence. They lead to peace.
My dear friend, you do not have to abandon your responsibilities to reclaim your life, but you may need to abandon the belief that your worth lives inside your exhaustion. You may need to sit longer than feels comfortable. You may need to listen to the parts of yourself you have been too busy to hear. You may need to let yourself exist without explanation, not because you are lazy, but because you are human. And being human was never meant to feel like constant survival.
Go outside. Take off your shoes. Let the earth hold you for a moment. Sit without needing to become anything. Watch the wind move through the trees. Let it remind you that movement does not require force. Let it remind you that life continues, even in stillness, especially in stillness.
You are not falling behind. You are returning.
And you were never meant to be anything other than fully, deeply, peacefully alive.
With you in this remembering, always….
Tina 💕
