This Week’s Journaling Theme: Rest and Permission
Mark McNease
This Week’s Journaling Theme: Rest & Permission
These are themes I use in my Your Write Path thematic journaling workshops. Write 800-1000 words on the main theme,. Sub-prompts are provided as a way to get you thinking. Use one of them, all of them, or none of them. The writing is the point.
As the season shifts and the days grow shorter, there’s an invitation to slow down. Trees lose their leaves, nature cools, and everything around us seems to rest a little This month, we consider resting ourselves.
For many of us, slowing down doesn’t come easily. We’ve learned to equate worth with productivity—the busier we are, the more we’re accomplishing—and stillness can feel unfamiliar, even uncomfortable. But rest isn’t something we have to earn. It’s something we can claim, the same way the trees do we they prepare to rest for winter. This month’s journaling invites you to notice where you’ve been withholding rest from yourself, and to explore what it might look like to welcome it.
Sub-Prompts
What does rest actually feel like for you? Not the idea of rest, but the felt sense of it. In your body, your mind, your day. Is it quiet? Is it slow? Is it something you recognize when it happens, or does it slip past you unnoticed? Does it make you uncomfortable, as if life is passing by, or you’re failing to get things done? Write about what genuine rest looks and feels like.
Where in your life do you need to give yourself more permission? Permission to pause, to say no, to leave something unfinished, whether you return to it or not, to choose comfort over accomplishment.
Write about a time you kept doing something when you should have paused or walked away. What was the result? What did you learn from it? Sometimes our bodies and hearts tell us to stop long before we’re willing to listen. Reflect on something you kept doing when you could have given yourself permission to stop or move on. And what might it have looked like to let go?
What would it mean to trust yourself more? Rest requires a kind of trust that the world won’t fall apart if you stop, and trust that you deserve care, from yourself or others. Write about what it would mean to trust yourself enough to rest.