Rest Is Not the End of the Story

Between the Breath: Essays on Rest, Leadership & Listening

It is no secret that rest has become a powerful cultural intervention. For many of us who have spent years navigating urgency, responsibility, and burnout, the invitation to rest has felt feel revolutionary. Rest allows the nervous system to recover from chronic survival. But rest is not the end of the story.

In her essay Uses of the Erotic Audre Lorde reminds us that the erotic is not indulgence, it is the body’s sense of what is meaningful. Here the erotic is described as a source of deep internal knowing, and when leaders are disconnected from this source of intelligence, our leadership becomes mechanical. But when we are connected with the erotic - with the body’s capacity to feel meaning and truth - our leadership story begins to change.

Rest allows the body to return to itself and the erotic guides us in living from that place.

For many - especially those whose bodies have carried the weight of leadership, care, and survival - rest has been a revolutionary return, a reclaiming of breath, and a refusal of urgency as the default state of living. But rest is not the end of the story.

When the word erotic appears in conversations about leadership or healing, it makes sense for many to flinch. We have been trained to collapse the erotic into sexuality alone, or to misunderstand it as indulgent, inappropriate, or private. And while those connections can be true, there is yet a powerful complexity that is available to us all.

The erotic is a source of deep knowing, a current of aliveness in the body, and a measure of how fully we inhabit our own lives. It is the feeling of being deeply present with ourselves. And for many due to mounting responsibility, trauma, chronic urgency, etc., that presence has been difficult to access. This is where rest enters the conversation.

Rest interrupts the relentless pace of survival. It allows the nervous system to soften enough for something deeper to emerge. But the intention of rest is not simply restoration. The intention of rest is actually reconnection, to ourselves. The erotic is the life force that tells us when something is meaningful. Because when the body finally slows down, it begins to remember the pleasure of leaning into the awe and wonder of our lives.

Without access to the erotic, leadership becomes purely performative. Strategic, perhaps; but ultimately, disconnected. Leaders who cannot feel their own aliveness often end up replicating the same exhausted systems they are trying to change.

But when the erotic is present, leadership changes. Our decisions emerge from a deeper place, vision becomes embodied rather than abstract, and integrity becomes easier to maintain because the body can feel when something is misaligned. The erotic does not make leadership less serious, indeed, it makes it more honest.

This is particularly important for Black women in leadership, whose bodies have historically been asked to carry extraordinary expectations, and know strength without the permission to rest. The result is often a subtle form of dissociation from the body itself. We learn how to lead from the mind and serve to the tune of survival. The erotic invites something different. It invites us back into the fullness of ourselves; as well as sensation, intuition, and the intelligence of our bodies.

At Selah. Somatic Therapy & Yoga, I work with leaders who believe their task is simply to learn how to rest. There was a time where I also believed this myself. Yes, rest matters, but then I experience something more that was available on the other side. When my body felt safe enough to rest, it also began to wake up.

I am a transformational and visionary leader, and in truth, my leadership falls flat once I lose track of the proverbial plot. It’s taken many years to know and understand what rest looks like for me. And once I committed to the practice, my creativity returned, my clarity sharpened, and perhaps most powerfully, my truth became easier to speak. This is the quiet power of the erotic. A deep internal alignment that allows us to move through the world held by our own authenticity.

As shared in The Erotic as Leadership Power, “When leaders reconnect to the erotic dimension of their lives, leadership changes…Because the erotic is not simply about feeling deeply. It is about living fully enough that our work carries life within it”.

Rest brings us to the door. But the real work begins when we step through it. Moving beyond rest invites us into a life that is fully inhabited. And leadership that is rooted not only in strategy, but in the depth of our aliveness.

A Closing Reflection

Before you move on with your day, let’s pause for a moment. When the body finally slows down, something else begins to emerge, aliveness.

Take a slow breath and ask your body a simple question: ‍ ‍Where in my life am I being invited not only to rest, but to also come alive again? ‍ ‍Stay for the exhale.

Selah.

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Between the Breath: Essays on Rest, Leadership & Listening‍ ‍is a space for reflection on rest, leadership, and the practice of listening in a culture shaped by urgency. The essays here draw from somatic therapy, embodied practice, and systems-level inquiry. It is not a place for quick answers or tidy conclusions. It is a place to slow down enough to notice what is already present For more information about our work, please visit: www.selahsomatictherapyandyoga.com