Read an Excerpt
Chapter 1
Have You Ever Met a Relaxed Woman?
We're not designed to live in survival mode. Our bodies need safeness. Our souls need rest.
As women, we are soft, strong, fierce, fragile, vulnerable, resilient, embodied, intuitive, and deeply interconnected with one another. We are also stressed, overwhelmed, and exhausted. Our desire to care and nurture has been exploited by our culture. Our capacity for kindness and compassion has been abused. Our hope for empowerment and equality has been manipulated into exhausting obligations and unrealistic expectations, leaving us feeling like there is never enough time and always too much to do. We have become a society of rushing women. Overburdened women. Exhausted women. Without seeing other women role-model what it means to be relaxed, to be at ease, to be free, many of us have felt anxious, apologetic, afraid, and ashamed all our lives. When the women who love us are unable to rest, relax, and honor their needs, it can be very difficult for us to do so ourselves.
In a society dominated by patriarchy, full of inequality, and obsessed with productivity, the relaxed woman is a rare being. Most of us have never met one, and becoming one can feel like an impossibility. We may have absorbed the manipulative cultural messaging that "relaxation" signifies laziness, a lack of ambition, indulgence, selfishness, resignation, and complacency. When we are scared of judgment and criticism, it can feel safer to conform to expectations of perfectionism, self-sacrifice, people-pleasing, and toxic productivity than to explore a more relaxed way of living.
And yet, even though we may never have met a relaxed woman, when we hear the words relaxed and woman together, they often resonate deep within us, reawakening a way of being that we know intuitively. Like a magic spell, they open a secret door, revealing to us a new hope, a new paradigm, a new possibility.
The Pain of Being
an Unrelaxed Woman
Often, we begin becoming relaxed women by becoming aware of where we are unrelaxed. Where we are not at rest. Where we are not at ease. Where we are not free.
She is so rare that it can be easier to get to know the relaxed woman through what she is not rather than what she is. We could call her opposite the stressed woman, the exhausted woman, or the burned-out woman; the rushing woman, the overcontrolled woman, or the disempowered woman; the hyper-independent woman, the self-silencing woman, or the overburdened woman. Maybe the best way to describe her opposite is simply as unrelaxed-defined as "tense, stressed, not at rest or at ease".
What are some of the signs of being an unrelaxed woman? In the words of the women I have worked with and interviewed:
Feeling chronically unsafe, being stuck in survival mode, judging our worth by our productivity, and living with a constant sense of inner urgency and impending doom.
Feeling anxious, ashamed, guilty, exhausted, lost, trapped, powerless, depleted, overwhelmed, unworthy, and unseen.
Experiencing insomnia, dizziness, migraines, gut issues, and chronic fatigue.
Always looking for permission from someone outside of ourselves, doubting our strengths and abilities, and treating every mistake like a catastrophe.
Being afraid of disappointing anyone, being a burden, rocking the boat, or appearing lazy.
Striving ruthlessly for perfection, overriding our inner rhythms, ignoring our intuitions, and treating ourselves like machines.
Suppressing our emotions, hiding our vulnerabilities, and bypassing our needs.
Overworking, overthinking, overplanning, and overachieving.
Silencing our voices, hiding our truths, masking, performing, and people-pleasing.
Finding it impossible to relax after a hard day working, caregiving, and mothering.
Feeling both overcontrolled and out of control, and yearning to rest yet being compulsively busy.
Being easily influenced by other people's opinions, feeling the need to do what is expected, and spending energy pursuing goals that don't truly matter to conform to society.
Feeling alienated from our bodies, our emotions, our hopes, and our dreams.
Wanting to hide and yet longing to be seen.
The costs of being stressed, exhausted, unrelaxed women-to ourselves, our families, and our societies-are vast. Emma, a therapist and mother of two, captures the pain of being an unrelaxed woman powerfully:
I woke up one morning and just collapsed. My body was debilitated. I didn't know what was wrong with me. My kids were really little and it was terrifying. I'm a therapist, so I knew the impact stress has on your body, but I just didn't see this coming. I was trying to give 100 percent to my kids and 100 percent to my clients and do everything else 100 percent, and it was too much. I was in denial that I had any limits. I thought I was superwoman. I didn't realize how exhausted I was. My body had been whispering to me through headaches and anxiety and difficulties sleeping, but I was too busy to listen. And then, one day, it shouted, "STOP."
There are many reasons why so many of us are unrelaxed, why so many of us feel unsafe and unfree. And we are all going to experience seasons of our lives when we feel tired and anxious, moments when we lose ourselves in busyness and urgency. We just don't want to get stuck there. If you identify with the signs of being an unrelaxed woman, there's nothing wrong with you. It makes complete sense that you're stressed and exhausted given what you've been through. Our minds are tricky, and we can so easily turn "not being a relaxed woman" into another stick to beat ourselves with, another judgment or criticism. The last thing I want is for any part of this book to leave you feeling guilty for not being "relaxed enough" or "regulated enough" or "good enough" in any way. Instead, my hope is that this book will awaken hope and possibility while giving you the tools to nurture a more relaxed way of being.
As you read, see if you can release any shame and any "shoulds"-"I should be more present," "I should people-please less," "I should find it easier to rest"-and approach this journey as an invitation, not even as "inner work" but as "inner play"-an opportunity to play with a new way of seeing, a new way of living, a new way of being.
Awakening the Relaxed Woman
The relaxed woman is free and wild and difficult to define. She manifests differently for each of us and at different times in our lives as we get to know her and to become her gently over time. She doesn't require us to be a certain age or race or class, and she doesn't depend on us being able to do a certain amount of self-care each day. She cannot be identified by external achievements or privileges, because what looks like freedom and success on the outside often feels like unsafety and unworthiness deep down. We can't force ourselves to become her by "hacking" our nervous systems or copying someone else's morning routine. Rather, we become her by integrating and embodying what feels true and matters deeply to us. Becoming a relaxed woman is less about what we do and more about how we attend to the world-carefully, lovingly, vulnerably. The relaxed woman is who we are when we live by our values, take off our masks, and relax into our most authentic selves.
As I am getting to know her in my own life, I am discovering that the relaxed woman is the self we have been taught to hide and despise-the sensual, wild, passionate, playful self that knows her worth, embraces her power, and trusts her intuitive voice. Below is a list of qualities of the relaxed woman that have unfolded over the years as I have listened to women's experiences and witnessed them begin to embody her. This list doesn't prescribe how a relaxed woman should be; rather, we can use it to awaken ourselves to the possibility of another way of being.
Qualities relaxed women share:
we feel safe and free in our bodies and in the world
we believe we are worthy, regardless of our productivity
we honor our needs for rest and silence, for intimacy and support, for peace and ease
we live with an increasing inner stillness
we prioritize authenticity and intimacy over performing and people-pleasing
we have the capacity to care deeply for ourselves, one another, and the earth on which we live
we know when to work hard and when to rest deeply, when to be fierce and when to be gentle, when to give and when to receive
we trust our intuitions, live by our values, and feel connected to our emotions, hopes, fears, and dreams
we accept our limitations, imperfections, and vulnerabilities
we feel an openness to all of life-pain and joy, hope and fear, grief and love
we luxuriate in the simple joys and glorious ordinary moments
we value ourselves enough to set loving boundaries that support our well-being
we respect other women's choices even if they are different from our own
we accept stress, change, and uncertainty as unavoidable parts of life and trust that we can cope with adversity when it
arises
we recognize when the pain of the past has been touched and awakened and, rather than letting it hijack us, welcome it and work with it in loving and compassionate ways
we keep our hearts open to the suffering in the world without feeling as though it's our responsibility alone to fix it
we know the difference between nonnegotiable responsibilities and unrealistic expectations
we embrace our childlike qualities-joyful, playful, curious, and carefree-and have fun and be silly
we know that we are worthy of rest, respect, compassion, love, and joy
Becoming a relaxed woman doesn't diminish the unavoidable stressors and pressures in our lives. Rather, it allows us to rise up to meet them; to navigate them with more grace, trust, and ease; and to recover from them so that we have the capacity to face whatever comes next.
Becoming a relaxed woman doesn't mean giving up on our ambitions and neglecting our responsibilities. We can be relaxed women and work hard toward our dreams. We can be relaxed women and passionately pursue personal growth. We can be relaxed women and do meaningful work, take care of our families, and show up for our communities.
Becoming a relaxed woman doesn't mean that we'll never experience anxiety or fatigue or that we'll live in a constant state of unwavering peace. Rather, it means that we can relax with whatever is present. We can relax with the chaos and mess and uncertainty. We can relax with our imperfections and failures. We can relax with our feelings of guilt and shame and anxiety. And as we relax and stop resisting reality, we free up a huge amount of energy. We discover our freedom-to accept and feel and grieve for those experiences that are beyond our control and to make changes and take action in those areas of life where our power lies.
Rest and reflect
Let's take a couple of minutes to connect with the relaxed woman within you. Close your eyes, deepen your breath, and invite a sense of your most relaxed, loving self to emerge. She may take a couple of minutes to awaken. Be patient, creating a safe space for her to unfold.
After you've got a sense of her (which may be very subtle at the moment), use the following questions to reflect on your experience of meeting the relaxed woman within you. If you embodied the relaxed woman . . .
What values would you live by?
What would you prioritize in your life?
How would you speak to yourself?
How would you eat, exercise, and take care of yourself?
How would you nurture your relationships?
What would you do for work?
How would you spend your free time?
Sometimes, when we do this practice, we can confuse our "relaxed self" for our idea of the "perfect self." Be mindful if your responses drift toward perfectionism, and see if you can sense how your body responds differently as you connect with this internalized version of perfection compared to the relaxed woman who lives within you.
Right now, the relaxed woman may still feel like a stranger, but as we begin this journey together, there will be increasing moments when you experience an overwhelming sense of "Oh, so this is how it feels to be a relaxed woman"-and it feels beautiful!
My Journey to Embodying
the Relaxed Woman
The more intimate I become with the relaxed woman, the more I sense her in different ways and on different levels. She is an archetype and a practice, a skill and a nervous system state, a paradigm and a possibility, a way of being and a process of becoming.
One of the words that came up again and again in my research was journey. And in many ways, the relaxed woman is just that. A healing journey. A heroine's journey. A journey of learning to take care of ourselves, to speak up for ourselves, to value ourselves as women. A journey of awareness and courage and hope.
The relaxed woman journey is the one I found myself on in 2020 after over two decades of embracing the stereotypical hero's journey, seeking validation in patriarchal systems, overworking, overachieving, people-pleasing, measuring my worth by my productivity, and juggling multiple jobs to make ends meet, only to end up burned out, in chronic pain, hormonally imbalanced, and spiritually empty. Continuing to live the way I had been living was no longer an option. From this exhausted and tender place, the relaxed woman journey began to unfold.
Part intuition, part psychology, part science, and part spirituality, this journey was a gentle process of exploring and integrating everything I'd learned since beginning my training as a psychologist in 2008 with the spiritual wisdom I discovered through teaching yoga for over a decade and by listening to the quiet whispers of my body and calling of my soul. For years, I'd known I needed to live a more restful life. I'd read the research, studied the science, and knew deep down that stress was the cause of a lot of my health struggles. But despite what I knew intellectually, I continued to overwork, overcommit, and neglect my body's needs-partly because of financial necessity, partly out of a deep sense of responsibility, and partly because I didn't know any other way of being.
I'm not sure what sparked the shift from awareness to practice-from knowing I needed to rest to actually resting-but I remember one morning in the early days of the first Covid-19 lockdown, my partner and I were sitting on the back step in our garden. Like many of us, I was feeling scared-for our health, our families, our freedom, our society-when, in an attempt to ease my ever-escalating anxiety, my partner gently said to me, "There's nothing you can do right now, so you might as well relax." In that moment, I realized I didn't know how to relax. Nor were there any women in my life I could turn to for guidance. And so, I began experimenting.
