May Unwind
Photo credit: MB
Resilience, Rest, Recovery
Hello friends,
I’m going to do something slightly different with this one.
Grab a pen and paper, or open the notes app on your phone. And if you feel like it, email me your answer I’d genuinely love to know.
Here’s the question:
What’s your definition of resilience?
Sit with it for a moment before you read on.
I wonder if something came up like…
Keeping going no matter what.
Bouncing back quickly.
Being strong without feeling.
Getting up again and again.
For a long time, mine was something like that last one. Resilience was getting up again and again and again, and growing a little stronger each time, never giving up.
It sounded admirable. It felt true.
But the more I sit with it, the more I notice that this definition of resilience is really just productivity in disguise.
Keep moving.
Don’t stop.
Hold it together.
Push through the tiredness.
Earn your rest later.
And I see the cost of it every week in the studio, in you, and in me.
Bodies that are exhausted but unable to switch off. People lying in bed at night, tired but wired. Clients who “rest” physically, yet their nervous systems never truly downshift. Shoulders that won’t drop even when the room is quiet, breath that stays high in the chest.
Rest and recovery are not always the same thing.
Sometimes, rest is not lying still.
Sometimes the body needs help feeling safe enough to soften.
It’s part of why I’ve gone deeper into somatics and breath science this year to understand what’s actually happening in the nervous system when someone can’t switch off, and how we help it shift. Not by adding another thing to the to do list, another cold plunge, another sauna, another protocol.
What I’ve learned is that we cannot force rest. It’s a practice. It takes time, awareness, and small acts of consistency to restore the body. It’s through breath, awareness, touch and movement that we widen the range in which we feel steady, present, connected, and able to meet life without depletion.
At Deep Unwind this is the direction my work continues to evolve.
Yes, I still work with sore muscles, tension and tired bodies.
But increasingly, I’m interested in something deeper:
Helping people shift from survival mode into restoration.
Because resilience isn’t how much we can endure.
It’s how well we recover.
And I really do want to know what’s your definition of resilience? Hit reply.
Warmly,
Georgie
A beautiful poem
The Way It Is by William Stafford
“There’s a thread you follow. It goes among things that change. But it doesn’t change…
While you hold it you can’t get lost.”
He goes on to name the hard things, tragedies, suffering, time unfolding and then says simply: you don’t ever let go of the thread.
Something about that feels like the truer version of resilience. Not endurance. Not bouncing back. Just staying connected to the thread, even while everything around you moves.
The body knows how to restore itself. Sometimes it just needs help feeling safe enough to begin.
IN THE STUDIO
Mother's Day Special
$210
If anyone has inherited the "keep going no matter what" definition of resilience, it's those doing the mothering.
This one is for them.
- 60-minute massage treatment
- A bottle of bath milk from Southern Swan – a homeopathic pharmacy in Tasmania
- A sachet of collagen cacao from Motherlode
A treatment, and something to take home so the softening continues after she leaves the studio.
Because some people need someone to say — go, rest, you deserve this.
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