Review Your Year With Me
🎁 Read below for holiday giving, giveaways, and gatherings!
Let’s look back on 2025 together, but not with a “year in review” exercise where you list all your career accomplishments or gratitudes.
Instead I want to focus on these questions:
🌟 How have you experienced both rest and unrest this year?
🌟 What has happened when you have explored the needs and longings of your body, mind, heart, and spirit this year?
Here are my reflections—and I would love to hear yours! Please contact me to share your thoughts.
I practiced proactive resting more of the time (not just resting in response to illness or exhaustion), which has looked like:
Lying down and listening to a guided meditation for 10-20 minutes before a work call or my kids came home
Scheduling meetings, and sometimes rescheduling them, in order to create more rest breaks in my day
Doing somatic practices in my car at stoplights, in line at the store, and in schools while working as a guest teacher
Taking an item—or three—off my to-do list (aka being less useful to capitalism) and instead petting my cats, being silly with my kids, or practicing the choreo to “Golden” from KPop Demon Hunters (yes, even without my daughter around).
A break with my cat (and rest role model) Marshmello
In long periods of struggle, I have reminded myself of Pooja Lakshmin’s wisdom that what I’m experiencing is not burnout, but betrayal by systems. I am having a reasonable reaction to the unreasonable expectations of broken institutions.
I have been forced to deepen into so many forms of unrest–uncertainty, crisis, chaos, distress, collapse–within my immediate family, my neighborhood, my community, and the wider world.
Instead of white-knuckling my way through and waiting to return to a type of control and order that is not coming (at least any time soon), I have practiced spending more time in the darkness, being with the compost of life, and worshipping mystery.
My experience with unrest has continued throughout much of 2025.
It showed up as resentment against my body’s failures, illnesses, and injuries—then poet Andrea Gibson reminded me that I am so lucky to have a body at all.
It showed up as rage against all the machines, which I have released by playing the Beastie Boys and other GenX music on repeat.
It showed up as grief over so many ongoing losses, which I have mourned through singing in community, led by skilled artists and grief guides.
And the paradox of unrest?
When we meet unrest with curiosity, we can metabolize and alchemize it, and in turn, meet our needs and longings, and find true rest.
I’ve met my body’s longing to reclaim its true energy cycles and be released from the false stimulation and adrenaline crashes of caffeine. (It’s only taken me six months to stop doubting and regretting this decision!)
I’ve met my longing for authenticity and integrity.
I have chosen to share my somatic work without involving social media because of the severe unrest (in this case, anxiety; overstimulation; and digital fatigue) these modes evoke in me.
I no longer pretend I can navigate these spaces without a high cost to my mental and physical health. And I know in my bones that this is a perfectly human response to manipulative and addictive technologies. I don’t deny it or apologize for it.
I’ve met my longing for space to think and trust in growth.
Instead of measuring my success on being booked, busy, and running at maximum capacity, I’ve practiced rejecting work opportunities that no longer fit my values and giving myself at least 24 hours to make decisions. I practice living in the uncomfortable timeline of very slow growth in the areas I care most about: creativity, community, and connection.
I’ve met my longing for solidarity and mutual support.
I shared and heard experience, strength, and hope in my recovery groups, in my somatic healing network, and in community organizing spaces.
One highlight was a rich conversation I hosted, exploring how we meet the moment through our social change roles in community. This was the first of many more gatherings on this topic, and I am so excited to see what we harvest next!
Choosing How We Meet the Moment: Exploring the Social Change Ecosystem Map community resilience workshop at Leaven Community in October
As we close out this year, I invite you to join me for several opportunities:
🌟 Collectively create a rest-affirming culture in a larger culture that is actively hostile to rest (especially in the consumerist frenzy and urgency of the holiday season):
Shared Rest Sessions at Atrium/Breathe Building
Mondays at 7:00-8:00 pm
Thursdays at 5:30-6:30 pm PST (Zoom)
🌟 Share a testimonial with me:
If my work has been meaningful to you, please consider leaving me a testimonial. I will be updating my website in the new year and would love to include your feedback.
In exchange for a testimonial, in the new year you will receive a recording of my upcoming class: Working with the Nervous System and the Polyvagal Model for Recovery and Resilience.
🌟 Support our local families and immigrant neighbors:
Ten percent of your generous contributions to me at More Human in December will be donated to the Portland Immigrant Rights Coalition (PIRC) and the Scott Family Resiliency Fund.
As always, please contact me with any questions, suggestions, or ideas.
More to come in 2026!
Your rest friend,
Stacy