Beloveds,
i want to be honest about what i thought this devotion was going to be.
i thought it was going to be soft. a permission slip. forty days of naps and journaling and maybe some gentle movement. i thought rest was the easy one.
IT WASN'T!
rest, it turns out, is one of the most confronting things you can ask a body that has been in survival mode for years to do.
because when you stop — really stop — everything you've been outrunning catches up.
the grief. the resentment. the rage. the anger. the exhaustion that lives so deep in the bones you stopped feeling it because feeling it would have meant you couldn't keep going. and you had to keep going. there was no one else.
i entered this devotion in the middle of weeks of fighting, stress about money, stress about moving, the full weight of being the primary everything for a toddler with no break, and no real "village" that everybody talks about that is required to raise a child. i started it anyway. not because the conditions were right. but because i decided the conditions were never going to be right and i was tired of waiting.
here's what forty days of rooted in rest actually produced:
the guilt left.
not all at once. slowly. but somewhere around day 20 i noticed i had sat down in the middle of the day — dishes in the sink, laundry waiting, Prince napping — and i wasn't scanning for the next thing. i was just... sitting. and there was no voice telling me i hadn't earned it yet.
that voice had been there my whole adult life. i didn't notice it until it went quiet.
my body started telling me the truth.
when you rest enough, the body stops performing and starts reporting. i started noticing where i was holding tension i'd normalized. the jaw. the shoulders. the way i'd stop breathing when jabari cried. the way my nervous system would spike before his dad even finished a sentence.
rest didn't fix any of that. but it made it legible. and you can't change what you can't read.
i stopped fighting where i was.
this one is the big one.
i spent the first half of this devotion resisting almost everything — the house situation, the financial pressure, the fact that my life did not look the way i had decided it would look by now. i was white-knuckling a vision while standing in a reality that kept refusing to cooperate.
somewhere in the second half i just ... let go of the rope.
not defeat. not giving up. something quieter than that. i stopped spending energy on the resistance and started spending it on what was actually in front of me. and things moved. not because i pushed harder. because i stopped blocking them.
the devotion ended on june 13. we moved to the countryside house the next day.
and on my first night in a house that needs more work than money can currently fix, in a community i swore i'd only return to when i was rich, with an almost-empty fridge and a toddler finally asleep —
i felt the most settled i have felt in months.
not because anything was resolved but because something in ME had been.
forty days didn't change my circumstances. they changed the woman standing inside them.
the book is coming. Rooted in Rest — everything the devotion uncovered, written from inside it.
the book is available for pre-order now at $17. and if you want to go deeper — the full devotion (all 40 days) lives inside The Sanctuary App, alongside everything else i'm creating. founding rate $44/month, locked for life. 22 spots. opens june 21 - secure your spot now.
Talk Soon,
Santana Chevel 🌹