I'm Natalie Lou and you're listening to the baggage reclaim sessions.

Hello hello.

How are you doing?

Sunday March 28th a few days ago, marked four years since my father passed away from cancer.

But it also really marks four years of me really re-examining my relationship

with rest and my perception of what I am allowed to do with my

free time.

I have thought a lot about laziness and selfishness and what happens when you push ourselves too hard and we go way over our bandwidth.

It's actually what I went through in the year or two after my father passed away that really made

me want to talk so much more about us taking care of our bandwidth.

But you know what?

There's a lot of us that are very resistant to taking care of us, to recognize that we have a bandwidth and that it needs to be respected

and nurtured and replenished, that we need to be mindful of how we spend it because some things energize us some things drain us and also because we are only one person. Where we spend our attention, which is our time, energy, effort, and emotions affects our bandwidth. And when we are resistant to rest, when we feel as if our so-called free time

belongs to everybody else but us, we just quite simply cannot have a healthy sense of well being.

We can't, if we're not resting, if we're not allowed to use our time in a way that best reflects who we are,

we can't have emotional, mental, physical and spiritual well-being.

Now, over the last several weeks or so, I have found myself repeating the

same piece of advice again and again, and I think it's because I've been having a lot of conversations with clients, with friends, with family, around exhaustion and burnout and overwhelm and obligation and frustration and people feeling wounded

and like they're kind of reaching their limit

of how much more they can put up with a frustrating pattern.

And they haven't necessarily come into a conversation going I have a problem with

rest I feel as if my free time belongs to everybody else but me but what they

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