I am here with you. I am you. When you call me now, there is no gap or distance between us. I am you and you are me. I am your grandmother. I am your mother. I am you. I am your daughter, your granddaughter and I am the voice of all of the women that have ever lived or will ever live. I am the divine feminine. I am the earth mother. I am Gaia. 

There is nothing to fear, nothing to strive for any more. You are home. Allow yourself to rest within my embrace. Rest in my arms. Lay your head on my breast and I will comfort you. I will hold you. You are home. Breathe deeply here and with each breath allow your lungs to expand and your shoulders to drop all of the weight of responsibility and grief that you carry on behalf of yourself and others. Rest easy here. Rest assured. Rest deeply, but make sure that you do rest beloved.

To rest is to take a moment of pause, to hang out in the emptiness that inhabits the space between one inhale and the next exhale. It is an absence of thinking, planning, doing, any form of active work. To rest is to be, without effort or expenditure of time, money or energy. To rest is to be relieved of duty or obligation, putting aside any guilt assigned to us by others or expectations placed upon others by you. 

To rest is a withdrawal from process, practice or discipline, a temporary reprieve from the should’s have to’s and musts that chase and chastise us driving us forward in the pursuit of goal attainment, self improvement or progress. To rest is an unadulterated acceptance of all that we are, a refusal to find fault or flaw in ourselves or others. It is also a wholehearted surrender to the way things are, without the impetus or desire to fix, change, improve or amend anything, during this period of rest.

To rest is to close your eyes and turn all of your awareness inwards, towards your breath and with each breath dropping down, dropping deeper, moving slower, feeling further into yourself, into the recesses of your own sacred temple, the container that is your body.

To rest is a stepping out, a redirection of your consciousness away from your head and your monkey mind, which often works overtime and at an unsustainable pace, churning, milling, planning, scheming, cogs grinding, wheels turning, keeping the coal fires burning.

To rest is to turn off all the productive machinery and grinding inner noise, allowing all of the thought activity to slow down and eventually grind to a definitive, ceasing, halt. Sending all of the factory workers home to their families with a blessing of much gratitude for their commitment, contribution and appreciation for a job well done.

To rest allows you to become aware of the slowing and to pay attention to the quietening down until a hushed silence descends over your village, cloaking it in a deep shroud of mystery and moonlight. Rest brings a sense of peace and harmony, permission to take a break from the stresses and strains of daily life, to stop pushing, trying, hustling, striving to be somewhere else or someone else other than where or who you are now.

To rest is to allow, to accept, to embrace, to recognize, to appreciate, to acknowledge all that we are, all that we have accomplished and the ways in which we have grown. It is about taking a moment to honour the love we have shared, the lives we have touched, the souls we have uplifted or inspired, the lives we have changes and even it if is just our own, the knowing that, that is enough, because it is the most important life we could ever change.

Cry my beloved shed all of the tears of relief and release that well up in you as you surrender to my loving embrace. With each and every tear letting go a regret, a resentment, a pain or a grey stained or blackened memory, a heartache or a heart-break yet unhealed. Cry now until all of the broken parts of yourself feel soothed, seen, valued and accepted and then keep crying until those parts are ready to knit and weave themselves back together into one complete, perfect brilliant whole.  Put your fears away and your worries down as you lay your head on my shoulder, so that I may run my fingers through your golden hair, that I may lovingly stroke your temples and massage them gently and slowly and that I may plant my tender kisses on the 3^rd eye of your forehead, and in so doing bestow all of the gifts and blessings on you that have been yours forever, for eternity, since the beginning of time, with this single kiss.