As a child of immigrants I was taught to dream big and work even harder. When I was a child I always knew the rules were a little different for me. My baseline was different; access to things like family, money, health, and leisure was not something I could share with those around me. Like any immigrant family, I was taught to face this adversity with hard work. This gift has helped me to become a strong resilient adult. It has also created unhealthy relationships with rest, self-centering, and expressing emotions.

Hard work is something I excel at. Give me a problem and I will keep my head down and work hard to solve it. This is part of what makes me a great athlete — I am able to work hard and exist in discomfort for extended periods of time. The downside to this is my inability to slow down and rest. The ways that generational trauma shows up in my body make it really difficult for me to rest deeply. For this reason I have trouble regulating my nervous system; I am constantly stuck in fight or flight mode. I have tried to develop tools and coping mechanisms for this all of my life, and some of the most powerful ones I’ve found are running and being outside. When I run, I can respond to the fight or flight feelings in a way that my body understands. Matching this energy through movement feels like I am speaking the same language as my body, and I am finally able to regulate my nervous system. To put it simply, when I run I feel like I can breathe, maybe for the first time that day.

Being outdoors is a healing experience for me and my community. That is the priority. I have started to learn that there are many BIPOC individuals are breaking cycles of generational trauma by being outdoors. We do this through investing in our own joy and rest. There are many of us doing this work. It can be isolating, but we are not alone.

The work of being the first — whether it’s the first in our families, our communities, or first that we know of — is the work of undoing and relearning. It is healing. We are disrupting narratives we’ve heard all our lives with our unwavering presence. We are doing this for our past, present and future ancestors. There is no roadmap to doing this work. It is deep and personal and difficult. Here are a few key things that have helped me:

1. Embrace models of abundance

Our fears of scarcity are deeply rooted to the capitalist systems we exist in. Believing there is not enough for everyone makes us compete with one another and burn ourselves out. I have found this to be especially true of immigrants; those of us who grew up with no foundation in this country are deeply afraid of scarcity. That scarcity starts from within - believing we are not enough. We are not enough for one or both of our cultures, we are not enough for our parents and relatives, we are not enough for ourselves. Confronting these narratives with ideas of abundance is the first step in this unlearning. There is more than enough. Of everything. Nature teaches us this with its forests and rivers and animals. Next time you go outside, try to find examples of abundance in nature. See what they can teach you.

2. Give yourself permission to rest

Repeat after me: My right to exist is not conditional. My right to rest is not related to how much I produce. You may understand that rest is revolutionary on a conceptual level, but if you’re anything like me you believe you are an exception to all of these rules. You believe everyone deserves rest except for you. Guess what? Thinking you are an exception is a form of self-centering that perpetuates the very same narratives we are trying to disrupt; being harder on yourself than everyone else means you have literally embodied ideas of capitalism and hyperindividualism. Immigrants tend to have a lot of difficulty with rest because we believe our self-worth is tied to our productivity. We learned this from our parents, who worked tirelessly to create opportunities at the expense of their own health. This self-sacrificial behavior becomes conflated with love.

You have the ability to break these cycles. Allow yourself to rest, experience grief, sadness, pain. This does not make you any less deserving of love and safety. You are an immigrant responding and reacting to a world that was deliberately made unsafe for you.

3. take a step outside of yourself

When we operate in a model of abundance, de-centering ourselves goes from being threatening to being liberating. Our ancestors rejoice. Doing deep inner child healing is hard work but also incredibly powerful. Invest in it. Listen to your body. Go outside. Tell the trees about your problems. If you’re struggling to show up for yourself, remember that this work is so much larger than you. Your own rest is directly linked to your ability to resist and disrupt oppressive systems - it’s part of our collective liberation.

Hey Immigrants, What’s Your Relationship to Rest?

1. Embrace models of abundance

2. Give yourself permission to rest

3. take a step outside of yourself