Giving Yourself Permission to Rest - 3/14/26

I talk a lot about soul growth, life lessons, awareness, gratitude. And I believe in it all deeply. I’ve lived it these past few years. And it has transformed me in ways words cannot fully describe.

But today I want to talk about something that sits just beyond those conversations. Something many people quietly experience, but very few recognize for what it actually is.

· It’s the exhaustion of being strong for too long.

· The quiet disappointment when you finally get to a better place in life and don’t feel the way you thought you would.

· And the gap between gratitude… and actual peace.

I know how fortunate I’ve been. I do not struggle to see it and I feel it deep in my heart. Not just materially, but in experience, wisdom, perspective, love, and support.

And yet…

If I could travel back six months, one year, five years, there are versions of me who would have done anything to be where I am.

I know that deep in my soul.
 

And like many of you, my life has moved through chapters. Periods of growth, periods of realization, moments where you become a slightly different version of yourself.

I have had many of those chapters.

In fact, I am just coming out of another one now.

After many years of struggle, growth, and searching, I had finally reached what felt like the best place in my life.

And yet there was a period of time where my inner experience was not rising to meet the place I had finally arrived in life.

That mis-match is where something inside you just doesn’t feel right.

Not that life is bad.

But that the inner experience does not feel the celebration you expected when you finally arrive somewhere you once longed to be.

And for a long time I felt like I lived in this strange place where I could clearly appreciate what I had and where I was… but it was never quite enough to lift me past that ceiling.

I thought I was tired because life had been hard.

But the truth was something else.

I never actually stopped.

Every time I got through something… I looked for the next thing to fix.

Every time life got a little calmer… I looked for the next problem to solve.

Every time I reached a place I once hoped for… I moved the finish line again.

And over time that becomes exhausting.

Not because life is always hard.

But because you never actually let yourself arrive.

You never stay long enough for peace to feel normal.

For a long time, I lived in what I call "www"

Not the internet.

Waiting.
Wanting.
Wishing.

Waiting for things to settle.
Wanting the next breakthrough.
Wishing I had or felt certain things.

Many of us live there.

We say things like…
I’ll feel better when I get that promotion.
When I have a certain amount of savings.
When I meet the right person.
When the next thing finally falls into place.

And without realizing it…
we keep pushing peace just a little further down the road.

And that is really the heart of what I want to talk about today, because it feels like a realization many people miss. It was certainly something I missed, even after my spiritual awakening.

To help you understand the place I find myself in now, I want to go back to a pivotal point in my life shortly after meeting Paul Saladino.

I experienced what I can only describe as a profound spiritual shift. It did not happen overnight. It unfolded slowly over time, but it completely changed my perspective on life, meaning, and ultimately led me to a deep discovery of my soul and a belief in something greater.

I want to share something with you that very few people know, just so you understand how dramatic that shift really was.

Before this awakening, I actually had legal documents drawn up and arrangements made to be cryogenically preserved when I died. You can laugh, that is totally fine. The idea was to freeze my body in the hopes that I could be revived in the future and live again.

Hey, if you don’t believe in God, the soul, or life continuing in any energetic way, it’s not a bad idea. To me, it was a roll of the dice. Better a chance than absolutely nothing, which is what I believed happened when you die.

My father, who did believe in God and the afterlife, used to joke with me about it. He would say, “You know what is going to happen, Chuck. You are going to die, get to heaven, finally see how peaceful and beautiful it is, and you’re going to be having a wonderful time with everyone up there then all of a sudden you are going to get sucked back into this life and its misery.”

The irony is not lost on me now.

But here is the important part.

I did not wake up to escape being human.

I woke up to understand it more deeply.

I began to understand the importance of every feeling we experience. Every challenge. Every struggle. Every opportunity to change and grow.

I began to see life from a much larger perspective, and how that perspective could be applied to everything.

I came to believe that the soul comes here to experience… to learn… to move through life cycles.

Not to get everything right.

But to live it fully.

To not distract ourselves or avoid feeling, even when it hurts… but to truly experience it.

What I started to see is that we spend so much of our lives trying to rush past our feelings.

We distract ourselves from them.

We bury them.

We try to solve them as quickly as possible so we can move on.

But those feelings are the experience.

They are not interruptions to life.

They are life!

And that part of this awakening is something I began sharing with others through the work I do. And it has been incredibly rewarding to share that perspective and I truly enjoy it.

But I want to be very clear about something.

I speak to you today not as a teacher who has arrived somewhere…

but as a student who speaks from lived experience and just moments of realization.

I did not awaken into perfection.

I awakened into awareness.

And here is the part no one really talks about.

Life did not suddenly get easier.

In fact, the last few years have been some of the most challenging of my life.

Growth can be exhausting… especially when it never stops.

I experienced long stretches of physical pain, fatigue, and weakness. Countless doctors. Endless tests. No clear explanation. This went on for years.

And, on top of the physical struggle came something quieter, and in some ways harder to explain.

An emotional flatness.

An underlying sadness.

And the confusion of knowing I should feel happier.

The mis-match between an external life that was good and an internal state that did not match it.

I had come so far. through so much struggle. 

I had so much to be thankful for. And I truly practiced gratitude and believed it deeply.

And yet I kept asking myself… why do I not feel on top of the world?

My past self would have given anything to be here right now.

Think about that for a moment…

Think about a past version of yourself that would have done anything to be where you are today.

We’ve come so far. We’ve been through so much.

So why… why are we not jumping for joy?

Somehow we manage to find our way to this moment… and then we find ourselves asking, what now?

And sometimes, when we do not know what now, we unconsciously create more hurdles. More struggles. More problems. Right?

Because discomfort feels familiar.

And peace can feel unfamiliar.

And even when we do not create more dysfunction — because that can be the reaction, right? A moment of calm feels uncomfortable, so we create chaos to return to what feels familiar.

But even when we do not create more dysfunction…

when we finally stop and look at how far we have come…

there still can be something underneath it all.

Here is the spiritual truth that often gets skipped.

Gratitude does not heal unmet emotional needs.

It can coexist with them.

But it cannot resolve them.

Many spiritually inclined people hit this exact ceiling.

We learn awareness.
We learn appreciation.
We learn perspective.
We see the lessons.

But we never learned how to release what has been carried in the body, the mind, and the identity for decades… sometimes even lifetimes.

Many of you know I do past life regression. Some of this stuff can hang around for a long time.

For me, this life involved a long arc of holding it together.

Bracing for the next storm.

And that is exhausting.

But what I did not realize is that I never actually stopped long enough to acknowledge what it took to get where I was.

From a young age, I learned how to adapt. Stabilize. Perform. Provide. Be responsible. Process loss and pressure internally while keeping things together externally.

That creates strength.

Depth.

Insight.

But it also creates a pattern.

And that pattern was this.

Even when things got better, I did not give myself permission to get familiar with peace.

I did not give myself permission to rest.

So when I reached a better place…

I restarted the race.

This became my lesson.

Learning how to stop restarting the race.

And there can be an unconscious sadness that says…

I made it… but I am tired.

Or…

I arrived… but I lost years living in tension to do so.
Years worrying about the future… or replaying the past.

And that sadness does not mean you regret your life.

It means your soul is looking for acknowledgment.

That was a heavy realization for me.

My soul was looking for acknowledgment.

Acknowledgment for what it endured.

Acknowledgment for how long I held it together.

Acknowledgment for the pain… the struggle… and for …….making it through.

And this is where the pauses become important.

Many of you who have been on our retreats have heard me say… make time for the pauses.

To sit in quiet.

To reflect.

To listen.

And just maybe we also need to build ‘acknowledgment’ into those moments of pause.

Life isn’t easy.

And sometimes we need to stop trying to move past that fact… and instead acknowledge what we have endured and what we have actually made it through.

And here is something else I realized.

There is a lifelong lesson for me around allowing ease without guilt, without waiting for the other shoe to drop, and without needing meaning to be earned through struggle.

I realized that I had built a belief system that said:

Peace comes after effort.
Joy comes after resolution.
Rest comes after everything is settled.

But life never fully settles.

Life never fully settles!

So I stayed on hold.

Braced.

And over time that showed up physically. Years of fatigue. Pain. Weakness. 

And emotionally, there was a low hum of heaviness. Flatness. A quiet sadness that gratitude alone did not touch.

The problem wasn’t that I wasn’t grateful.

The problem was that I didn’t know how to sit in peace long enough to let it feel normal.

I did not know how to live inside the life I had already created…

I kept thinking something was missing.

But what was missing was permission.
Permission to rest.
Permission to stop looking for the next lesson.

Permission to say where I am is enough.
 

And then it hit me...

I am closer than I have ever been.

Maybe I am at eighty percent.

But you know what… eighty percent is a pretty damn good place to be.

So I started asking myself…

Why is eighty percent not enough?

Why is where I am right now not enough?

Why can’t I stop striving and simply be with the goodness that already exists today, in this moment?

So I asked myself a question.

What part of me is afraid to rest?

And in that moment something became very clear to me.

Maybe the problem was never that life wasn’t good enough.
Maybe the problem was that I never allowed myself to stop striving long enough to live inside it.

If I rest… do I lose my identity?
If I rest… do I lose purpose?
If I rest… do I disappoint someone? That is a big one for me.

And the truth was…

I didn’t know who I was without striving.

So my first awakening was about understanding life.

This awakening now is about actually living it.

I am here to learn how to live without bracing against life.

And I want to offer something gently to you today.

You don’t have to keep earning your right to rest.

Maybe the work now is not to grow more.
Maybe it is to finally let yourself arrive.

Maybe it is to allow eighty percent be enough.

Maybe it is to let peace feel unfamiliar long enough for it to become normal.

And maybe it is to acknowledge what it took to get to where you are…
and then finally let yourself rest.