A January Quest for Rest

No knights but definitely some monsters

Welcome to my experiment. I’m going to try putting some thoughts on here from time to time, and see how it feels and what happens. Some of it will just be me musing on my own experiences, some of it will be offered in the hope that it’s useful to the performers I work with. All of it will be up for discussion, because I’m no expert.

A different January

I’ve fought with January my whole life, dreading its arrival and just barely dragging myself through it, excitedly breaking into February thinking I can see the light only to find that March stands guard blocking the sun until finally I can see and breathe again in April. This year I decided to do it differently. I chose to rest. I’ve been overdoing it at work and at home and my mind was suffering. I no longer felt or behaved like myself, I couldn’t access my intuition as I normally can and I was crying at the drop of a hat (I mean, I cry frequently, but normally it takes a little more than a falling accessory to set it off). Images of comfy armchairs, blankets, books and cups of tea, absorbing TV, afternoon naps and eating freshly baked goods filled my head and I set off on my month of relative quiet full of hope.

That’s not what I expected

Lots of those things did manifest (although surprisingly for me I didn’t do much baking). However I never expected to experience the kind of increase in anxiety that has plagued me, or the struggle with the Productivity and Guilt Monsters who apparently live rent free in my brain. Stripping back the schedule has exposed a nervous system revving on its highest gear with no fuel to power it. My stomach churned as soon as I was quiet. I sat stiff and braced against the phone ringing, and felt my stomach drop every time it pinged. It’s shocked me to discover that I could no longer simply rest. I had to put a bunch of work into it. I had to listen carefully to my body and respond to what it was asking for rather than what I thought it needed.

Here’s what I discovered

I have to protect my alone time. I simply can’t do my job without it. I thought the ceiling to how much I could work was the number of hours I could be physically present in rehearsal spaces. It’s not. It’s the number of hours I can be “on” and have sufficient hours to be on my own to decompress, process and prepare for the next “on”.

Decompressing and processing come about for me through restful movement (for me, swimming and walking), sleep and day dreaming. Literally, looking out of the window thinking about nothing in particular and yet somehow that’s everything.

I have to be able to feel my intuition. (Here’s where it gets woo-woo, but heads up team, that’s just how it is). I cannot do my job without being in touch with my intuition. All the knowledge about vocal function in the world is useless to me if I’m not starting from my intuition. That’s not true for every vocal coach but it’s true for me and I forget it at my peril. Fundamentally, my rest time is about doing whatever it takes to stay in touch with that.

Here’s what (and who) helped

I had time to read, listen and watch this month and they all helped me to land back inside myself for the first time in months and months.

Dr Joseph Jebelli writes a powerful manifesto for a new world order around work and rest in his book The Brain At Rest. He does so using the latest scientific research into brain function and by looking at how different cultures approach rest. Let me tell you, we have SO much to learn. Highly recommend.

Katherine May has been nothing short of a spiritual life-line this month. Her book Wintering and her podcast The Clearing have helped me find the road back to the truest parts of myself. There’s a lot of miles yet to go but her language and her willingness to talk openly about the things most people seem to think are daft has shown me I’m not walking it alone.

I’ve watched Hamnet twice this month. It is utterly beautiful to look at, and full of truth. The performances are everything I try to help my students to reach for - authentic, truthful and apparently unfettered by doubt or fear. It’s how I’d like to live 2026. I’ll leave you with a quote from the beautiful companion book Even As A Shadow, Even As A Dream (by set photographer Agat Grzybowska, Director Chloe Zhao and lead actor Jessie Buckley) which landed right in the middle of me:

“We are, none of us, made up
Of the matter we were led to Believe.”