Trusting the Rest Before the Rise: A Somatic Approach to Healing and New Beginnings
As we enter a new seasonal cycle — emerging from winter in the south, winding down from summer in the north — many of us feel the quiet stirring of change. This transitional time offers an opportunity to pause, integrate, digest, and reset. In eating disorder recovery, these pauses are more than symbolic — they are essential phases of healing.
In a world that celebrates productivity and hustle, pausing often gets dismissed. The cultural pressure to do, to set goals, optimize routines, to tighten up loose ends — the pace is relentless, often pushing us to skip over the quiet magic of rest and integration in favor of constant striving.
But the body also needs rest in its cycle of action. This part of the cycle is considered the parasympathetic “rest and digest” state, and it is where completion and integration occur — where nourishment gets assimilated and where leftovers are released.
From this place of digestion, where we take in what we need and let go what is no longer required, space, clarity, and balance emerge.
For those healing their relationship with food and body, this rest-and-digest phase, which is essentially an ending of a (food) cycle, can feel unfamiliar. Endings may bring up agitation, stillness may stir discomfort, and the absence of distractions can surface unprocessed emotions or unmetabolized experiences.
Yet healing isn’t just about action — it’s also about allowing. Rest isn’t giving up; it’s tuning in. And we need to land, be, rest, and allow if we wish to heal, grow, and transform.
Why We Resist Stillness in Recovery
It’s common to resist rest. The quiet liminality might feel threatening when we’ve long equated movement with progress, control with safety. For many in recovery, stillness can be tangled with guilt, fear, shame, or a sense of inadequacy.
Whether it shows up as compulsive movement, post-meal anxiety, bingeing or restricting, or the endless grind of doing — these responses often reflect our nervous system’s way of coping with the vulnerability of endings and unknowns.
When we bulldoze past endings or transitions, we leave cycles incomplete — and in that incompletion, we often feel confused, unfulfilled, insatiable, hungry for more, and perpetually “not enough.”
But since we cannot leave rest out of the cycle, it will find its way in, and more often than not (and unfortunately), stillness finds us only through the slamming doorway of burnout or illness.
Completing the Cycle: Rest as Sacred Metabolism
Rest is not passive nor indulgent. It’s a vital process of assimilation — of metabolizing not just nutrients, but emotions, experiences, and beliefs. In eating disorder recovery, this phase supports the nervous system to recalibrate, the body to repair, and the heart to reconnect with a deeper sense of enoughness.
By honouring endings — the pauses between chapters — we make space for clarity to emerge. Instead of rushing into the next strategy or urgent self-improvement plan, we learn to trust our inner rhythm, and step forward with greater intention, guided by our lucid, inner wisdom. This is how we let transformation unfold from the inside out, rather than from yet another place of doing.
Living the Liminal: Trusting the Space Between
This season invites us to slow down and listen. Whether you’re stepping out of winter’s cocoon or beginning to release summer’s fullness, it’s a powerful time to pause, reflect, and reorient.
Liminal space — the “in-between” — is fertile ground. It’s where something old dissolves, and something new hasn’t yet formed. It’s the butterfly in the cocoon of metamorphosis.
In somatic recovery, this space is crucial. It’s where we learn to hold sensation, to tolerate uncertainty, and to let clarity emerge in its own time. Indeed, there are actual skillsets for the mind, body and heart that we can learn, refine, and master so that that we can move through each new chapter of our lives with grace, resiliency, and courage.
Change doesn’t happen only by doing. It happens by changing the way we relate to doing. This is the heart of embodied recovery — not fixing ourselves, but learning to meet ourselves with compassion, curiosity, and trust.
Even when clarity feels distant, we can rest in the knowing that life is always in motion, and that the unknown will eventually reveal itself.
The rest before the rise: do you trust it?
Trusting this pause allows us to open the door to new beginnings, stepping forward with clarity and intention.
Somatic Reflections for This Season
Take a few moments to drop into your body and gently reflect on the following:
How does your body hold the experience of “I haven’t done enough”?
What is calling for your attention to be properly digested? An unresolved emotion? An unacknowledged experience?
What nourishment — physical, emotional, or spiritual — might help you meet these undigested places within?
What does it feel like in your body to believe, even for a moment, “I am enough”?
Take the time to integrate what is ending, clear away any fog of doubt, and gently add in supportive, soul-based nourishment — whether that’s in the form of embodiment practices, nature, community, or tender self-compassion.
Rise When You're Ready — Not When You're Rushed
Life’s mysteries unfold when we loosen our grip on certainty and set down the heavy armor of to-do lists, making space for the delightfully surprising, inspiring and invigorating magic.
As this new cycle mysteriously unfolds, may you give yourself permission to rise slowly. To integrate what’s been, tend to what’s here, and celebrate the magic that is bound to come.
You don’t have to start with a sprint. Recovery is cyclical, not linear. Let yourself rest, digest, and return (again and again) — not from pressure or perfectionism, but from trust.
When we allow rest and digest, we find ourselves more present, more attuned to our needs, and more empowered to act from a place of clarity and trust.
Trust that in your body’s rhythm lies the wisdom of transformation. Rest in the knowing that you’re already on your way.