an invitation to the Temple of Belonging aka Rest Class
Update at launch time - Thank you for finding your way here. Rest “Class” has taken on a life of its own this week as this work comes to a culmination and is almost ready to be shared. I don’t even know what to call it anymore. But I suppose I wanted to let you know I am so excited about it, and the generosity with which it wants to come into form. It truly feels like the heart-child of the last 7 years of my life, as I’ve been a researcher and a student of Rest, a teacher of Rest, a teacher of teachers of Rest. It has me showing up on video having honest dialogue about practice (video, in the past, has been a vulnerability barrier hard for me to cross, and this felt so natural and so connective!), sharing writing I was saving for my next teacher training cohort (which is currently on hiatus indefinitely), and examining the nuance, and care, with which we can come to these practices. Anyways, if it is calling to you, please join. I’m trusting it and going with the flow. Building trust in the practices that sustain me and myself moment by moment, project by project, chance by chance. Reach out with any questions, and if sacred support (sliding scale) would help make your participation possible please find more information and codes below. xo Gwendolyn
Welcome. This is a space for the exploration of Deep Rest. A soft place for our curiosity and our weariness to land. A practice ground for living a receptive life with spaciousness, and ease.
Rest Class is an open door, an invitation to establish practice, tend rest as a skill, and experience the Pause. An invitation to compassionate presence with yourself, the heart of all relationship.
I am so grateful that you have found your way here, and excited for the journey that opens up before us.
What is Deep Rest?
Deep Rest is a deliberate, supported practice of non-doing held in a container with a beginning, a middle, and an end.
A marker of Deep Rest is hovering in a prolonged state of liminality - between waking and sleeping.
Deep Rest is a Portal
Rest as integration
Rest as preparation
Rest as transition
Rest as an act of honoring
Rest as pause
Rest as repair
Rest as restoration
Rest as reconciliation
Rest as replenishment
Rest as relationship
Rest as revelatory
Rest as revolution
Rest as sacred listening
Rest as connection
Rest as compassion
Rest as creative practice
Rest as an act of living
Rest as an art of dying
Rest as surrender
Rest as healing
Rest as care
Rest as dreamscape
Rest as visioning
Rest as intention
Rest as presence
Rest as patience
Rest as potential
Rest as spirit work
Rest as body work
Rest as heart work
Rest as grief work
Rest as joy work
Rest as no work
Rest as liberation
Rest as a journey
Rest as a return
Rest is a birthright,
it does not need to be earned
and
Rest is also a practice.
In my vision of the future we are well rested. We are spacious, not hurried. Supported, in every way, together building a scaffolding of care. There are times of course that we can’t lie down and close our eyes (even if we really want to) and other times, we deny ourselves the opportunity, even when it’s there. What I am advocating for is prioritizing and choosing, again and again, spaciousness wherever we can find it, wherever we can make it, wherever we can offer it. A pause, a caesura, an interlude where we can find ourselves again, connect with intention and integrity, modeling with permission and action the cultural shift toward rest. Here is space for practicing the deep dive into what patience and compassion really feel like in our own bones and breath. Here is space to vision a future where we are all safe, nourished, and at rest.
This is soul work, heart work, but also very human work - providing the fuel for both individual and community care.
Rest Class is a month long container to support a lifetime of practice. Offered through a trauma informed lens, this offering serves to strengthen our understanding and relationship to Deep Rest as both birthright and practice. All materials are delivered as recordings or pdfs, including:
90 minute class on the foundations of practice, honoring our restlessness, the types of Rest, and the portals of Rest (update: 2 hours of material in digestible 20-30 minute segments).
an accompanying guidebook with prompts, writings on Rest, and poetry
recorded Deep Rest practices offered weekly for four weeks
lifetime access to materials and recordings (class, guidebook, and 4 recorded deep rest practices)
update: sacred shapes and finding support, and how to make a bolster at home
Enrollment is OPEN through Sunday, April 24th with 25% of funds this weekend going to The Caring. Materials are live in the class portal and waiting for you!
Investment:
This offering is $80. Payment Plan options (40/month or 26.67/month) are available.
If sacred support would make your participation possible, please reference the sliding scale guidelines here. Codes for both 25% and 50% off are available on the registration page.
The practices of Savasana, Yoga Nidra and Restorative Yoga were a lifeline as I was learning to Rest, and since 2015 I have been holding and leading the spacious Pause as an intentional offering - privately, in community, at work places, in rest based trainings and on retreat. This iteration of Rest Class reflects the ways that Rest has touched and transformed me into a clearer, more compassionate self, lessons brought back from my personal relationship with the liminal, and whispers the quiet has told me.
Guides and inspiration that orient me toward this work include the archetype of the wellspring, the vessel, and the vision, earth’s landscape and the body’s landscape, both inner and outer cycles, poetry as meditation, and Greater Nature. You can read more about me and these practices here: /aboutgwendolyn.
and can email with any questions: hi@gwendolynren.com
I don’t want a busy life.
I don’t want a busy life. I want a generous one, a spacious one instead. I want delicious meals and quiet afternoons and nature all around me. I want laughter. Heart companions. I want deep conversations with myself, warm tea, and the voices and words of elders and teachers close. I want to listen deeply and intently to life, speaking through the voice of birds, the old growth of trees, the tiny blades of grass, the heavy snow. To my body. I want to honor what they tell me. What I tell me? What I find? What somewhere deep within me knows.
I want hard truths and soft landings. I want to be broken open a hundred times so I can practice the art of mending and I want to record the stories of what it’s like to learn, and unravel, unbind, learn again.
I don’t want a busy life. Busy lives are too close together, move too fast, leave no time for appreciation, or savoring. A relationship of haste is one I can never fully arrive into. It leaves no taste on my tongue, no symphony of the heart.
I want a generous life. A slow one, a full one. A kind one, a compassionate one, a simple one. So that I might be a wellspring for every being that I meet, even myself. So that nourishment and the vitality of a well lived life flows to and from me with ease. Each breath breathing space between the busyness, each breath reminding me that there is another way.
