The Art of Doing Nothing: Finding Rest and Renewal in Stillness

I haven’t been very good at doing nothing lately.

Between the nonprofit trip, the pumpkin patch, Cedar & Cypress, and the constant tending of family life, my days feel like soil that’s been turned one too many times…air-hungry, overworked, losing its softness. I keep telling others that rest is sacred, yet I catch myself racing past my own words. It doesn’t feel like hypocrisy so much as forgetfulness. The kind that happens when love for many things stretches you thin.

As I sit here wanting to find the words to inspire, I can feel my mind stumble over phrases and ideas. Thoughts swirl to the surface and then disappear again. I begin to get emotional from tiredness, and in this space I realize that life has a way of making us all human. Even with the best intentions, it pulls us into cycles of chaos that test our boundary-setting skills.

There’s a quiet ache underneath it all…a knowing that the body is asking to be still, to be un-useful for a while, to lie fallow the way a garden must before it can bloom again.

For me, it’s restlessness, anxiety about the past, worry about not being a good mom, unexplained tears, and the dreaded artist’s block. Writing this now, it feels so obvious: weeks of not setting boundaries and saying “no worries, I can make it work” have led straight to burnout.

You can’t create in barren soil. So what does this mean? Where do you go from burnout to begin again, and how do you prevent this very human pitfall?

Maybe the first step is to stop trying to fix the burnout.

To stop treating rest like a problem to solve and instead recognize it as the body’s quiet request for mercy.

Even the most fertile garden goes fallow for a season, not because it has failed, but because life is rebuilding underneath.

The art of doing nothing isn’t the absence of care; it’s what allows care to mean something again.

It’s the walk you take without a podcast in your ears, the cup of tea you finish before checking your messages, the breath you let all the way out before moving on.

Little acts of non-doing that remind the nervous system the world won’t collapse if you pause.

From here you can begin again…not with a new list, but with new soil.

Boundaries become the fences that keep the garden safe.

Sleep, warmth, and quiet become the water and sun.

And the small moments of stillness between tasks? They’re the seeds.

I too needed this reminder as I tended the tears that came from my own mind-made stories of failure.

The heart has a way of confusing fatigue with inadequacy. It tells you that being tired means you’ve done something wrong, when in truth it only means you’ve cared deeply for too long without refilling the well.

So as I begin to mend, I offer this forward…not as instruction, but as companionship. Maybe you’ve felt the same ache: the quiet guilt of being human and finite in a world that never stops asking for more.

If you’re here, reading this, perhaps this is your reminder too. Healing doesn’t happen in motion. It happens in the pause, in the kindness you give yourself when you finally stop.

So where do we begin again?

Not with a grand plan or a fixed timeline, but with one small gesture of willingness, doing nothing as self care.

Rest, I’m learning, is less about stopping and more about allowing, allowing the soil to stay bare for a while, allowing the body to feel without rushing to repair.

Maybe for you it starts with a single breath you don’t cut short, or a cup of tea you drink all the way to the bottom. Maybe it’s saying no, closing the laptop, or watching the light change without reaching for your phone.

Whatever it looks like, it’s enough.

Because healing doesn’t arrive in a rush of energy; it comes back quietly, like water seeping into dry ground. It waits for us to become still enough to feel it.

So if you’re reading this from your own season of depletion, consider this your invitation: let the garden rest. Let yourself rest.

The world will keep growing while you do.

If you’re not sure where to start, begin where breath begins.

Find a quiet corner, pour something warm, and listen to the 7-Minute Autumn Reset…you’ll find it in the menu.

Let the sound and the breath remind your body that it already knows how to rest, without needing permission.

These are the small still points we build our lives around moments where the soil breathes, rituals of rest where the nervous system softens, and the world feels safe again.

Next week I’ll share a ritual from the Stillpoint Collection that was born out of this very lesson: rest as rhythm, not reward.

For now, may you give yourself the grace of doing nothing,

and trust that even in stillness, everything in you is quietly growing.

Much Love,

~Shai