How to Rest, Receive, and Come Back to Yourself

After six months in the dark, Erin Patten returns embodied. On claiming versus becoming a woman of Spirit, the fallow season, and why rest is the real work.

How to Rest, Receive, and Come Back to Yourself

This is my first solo cast in a little over six months.

The last time it was just me and you in what I like to call the confessional room, I told you I was leaving. I was fasting from alcohol and from social media. I was pulling all the way back, going into the dark on purpose, into the shell, into the cocoon. And sometimes you have to disappear in order to come back to yourself. That is exactly what I had to do. I got back on Instagram two weeks ago, and this is me re-emerging. Not the same woman who left. An embodied one.

Something rose up in me in that first post back, and I want to build this whole conversation on top of it. It is one thing to claim to be a woman of Spirit. It is another thing entirely to be an embodied woman of Spirit. Embodiment is the difference between the teaching you have memorized and the teaching that has become your flesh. It is the work of taking everything you have been learning and absorbing and finally implementing it, right in the middle of the traumas and the hurdles and the challenges you are actually living.

The Hardest and Most Humbling Season of My Life

I want to be honest with you, because I am always honest with you about what is going on in my life. The past six months brought me some of the greatest challenges I have ever faced. I was still dealing with the backlash of a custody situation. I was caring for my mother by myself and facing betrayal around her care. I was accused of heinous things in the middle of pouring out every ounce of care I had, when there was no one else doing the work but me. I sat in that judgment. I sat in the accusations. And there were days I felt alone, dejected, and honestly worthless.

There was a time I would have been ashamed to say any of that out loud. I used to look at my life and think it looked like a circus. Police at the door. A criminal investigation. A civil investigation. Court. I call it a dramedy, because how does a woman this devoted to bettering herself and uplifting the people around her keep getting met with so much negativity. Someone as close to me as my son’s father has put real, intentional work into painting me as the villain, when all I have ever done is try to pour into him and into our family and into our son. That kind of resistance from someone you love is a particular kind of pain.

So if you are in your own version of that right now, hear me. When the people you care for most can only see the worst in you, you have to come back to yourself. Especially in the dark night of the soul, you have to remind yourself of exactly who you are, because in those seasons no one else is going to be able to affirm it for you. Only you and God can hold that line.

Remembering Who I Am

I spent this season remembering why I came here. I came to this life to be the best human being and the best woman I could be, and I let the material do its work on me. The Way of Mastery and the Shanti Christo Foundation carried me. Hearing the channeled words of Yeshua ben Joseph on forgiveness and on betrayal gave me my life back. The invitation was to let more of God move through me, to see my whole life as a vessel for God to experience through me. I know that can sound like a cliche until you are actually living it. Co-creation at its truest is what happens when you finally stop clenching and let yourself be a channel.

Sitting all the way down is what revealed it. I had so much anger in me. So much resentment. So much done-ness with the betrayal and the ugliness and the insanity of it all. I had been suppressing every bit of it in the name of keeping the peace and pushing through. And when this season finally sat me down, all of it came up loud and clear, and I got to actually see it, hear it, and feel it. That is not a breakdown. That is a revealing.

What the Body Knows

This is where the body comes in. I have spent real time with human design and with astrology this season, and I have come to know myself so much better. The gift of embodiment is that you stop making decisions from your head and start hearing the truth in your body. A clear yes. An absolute no. When you are truly embodied, you can feel the difference, and you can act on it without running it through your mind first.

Let me make the distinction plain, because it changed how I move through my days. A decision is something your mind makes because it is afraid that if it does not act, nothing will happen. A response is something your body gives because the energy is simply there, and it feels almost easy. This season I learned to wait for the response instead of forcing the decision. Sometimes that meant sitting with a message I wanted to send and feeling a quiet no rise up, so I let it go unsent. Sometimes it meant feeling a clean yes and moving on it without needing to manage every detail on the other end. Both are the same practice. You let the body speak first.

So much of our confusion is not that we are lying to ourselves on purpose. It is that we have never built a deep enough connection to self to hear our own truth in the first place. Embodiment is what closes that gap. It lets you set the boundary, which is really just the healthy masculine part of you holding a clear line, and it lets you trust the line once you have set it.

Fullness or Emptiness

Here is a practice I ran all season, and I want to hand it to you. Before you reach out to anyone, ask yourself one question. Am I reaching from fullness, or am I reaching from emptiness. Am I making contact because I genuinely care and want to engage, or because I am hungry for validation and want to be doted on and told I am beautiful and wanted.

For me, so often it was the second one. And when you reach from emptiness, you hand the other person the power to decide how you feel. If they do not respond the way you wanted, you spiral, you take it personally, you want to block them, you feel bad about yourself. But when you reach from fullness, the response stops being the point. You already know where you stand. Either way you are okay. That is the freedom embodiment buys you, and you can practice it in any relationship in your life.

The gut-check is simple. Before you hit send, ask yourself whether you could feel whole even if no reply ever came. If the answer is yes, send it freely, because you are giving from your fullness. If the answer is that you need the response in order to feel okay, that is your signal to pause. Not to shame yourself. Just to pause, and to fill your own cup first, and to send from there instead.

The Martyrdom of All or Nothing

There is a version of love that is really martyrdom wearing a prettier dress. It says give it all or give nothing. And we go-getter women, we entrepreneurs, we mothers and caregivers, we are all-or-nothing beings by default. So sometimes the universe opens a gap in your life to break that pattern for you. Mine was a gap where I truly had nothing to give. Not financially, not physically, not energetically. Nothing at all.

That was humbling in a way I did not expect. Who am I if not the giver. Who am I if not the generous one, the humanitarian, the one everyone can lean on. When I could not be that, I had to meet a version of myself I had never sat with. And it turned out she was not empty at all. She was being filled.

The Fallow Season

I learned so much about harvesting and gardening and agriculture this season, because that language runs all through spiritual text, especially the Bible. There is a thing called the fallow season, when you let the land rest. You let the animals graze. You even let the weeds grow. And you do it on purpose, because when you finally come back and till the soil and plant again, everything flourishes, since the ground has grown ripe and fertile while you were away. The foundation gets laid underground while it looks like nothing is happening.

That is what this was for me. I had to trust God to give me exactly what I needed, and here is the miracle. I never went without. Even without all the accoutrements I am used to, I always had enough. I know how to make a dollar out of fifteen cents. I have been young and broke in New York. But I had grown so used to the luxuries of my life that this kind of trust felt foreign, and honestly scary. And still, every single day, my mana was there. My daily bread was there. Exactly what God intended for me in that moment, nothing more and nothing less.

Enough Is the Discipline

Enough is the discipline. I want to say that to every woman who is in a season of feeling like she does not have enough. You have exactly what you need. The hard part is not the provision. The hard part is getting comfortable in the enoughness when your whole life has trained you to reach for more. I have felt that discomfort intimately. I am only now coming out of it, and I can tell you the energy shifts before the physical does. The abundance was real for me long before it fully showed up in my hands, because I could feel it and see it already here.

Rest Is the Work

I want to give you permission for something. The rest is the work. I met a young man at my gym who used to work in tech and got laid off, and he was almost apologizing for where he had landed. I told him what I will tell you. When in your life were you ever going to get this much time to simply sit, and think, and be. For six months I have had exactly that, and one line from the Way of Mastery kept returning to me. God promised that we need not do anything. To be able to rest in the nothingness is the work. I will say it again, because we resist it so hard. To be able to rest in the nothingness is the work.

So many of us want to be busy every waking minute. We want motion, action, output, proof. But most of the time it is not about the motion at all. When you are walking in alignment, you are walking in your purpose, and you will walk right into what is meant for you. So if today you feel unmotivated, if today you want to lie in bed and do nothing, honor that voice. If it is a few days, honor it. When was the last time you let yourself. Most entrepreneurs never have.

I have a friend who recently took a short boat trip, nothing fancy, just something local, and she told me it was the first real day off she had taken in three years. Three years. And I understood her completely, because that has been my life too. We drive ourselves so hard that we cannot give our own selves a single break, and then we turn around and call that dedication. It is not. It is a nervous system that never learned it was safe to stop.

I had to ask myself where the opposite belief even came from. The one that says if I do not make it happen, it will not happen. That is control wearing the costume of diligence, and mine came straight out of a hard childhood, out of the conditioning that told me if I did not get the grades, if I did not excel, if I did not perform, then no one would love me and no one would pay attention. That is a heavy thing to build a life on, and the pressure of it can almost bring you to tears once you finally feel it. A season of rest is exactly where you get to go back and ask, whose voice is that, and do I still have to obey it.

What I Laid Down

To have this season, I had to lay almost everything down. The singing lessons. The dance lessons. The team of people who used to be in my home ten and twelve hours a day. The whole marketing engine pushing my content. I had just launched Ra Beauty with a massive party, and even that had to pause. My hibiscus petal oil, the thing I pour into my hair every single day, the brand I love so much, had to sit while I sat. And it turned out the laying down was the entire point.

Authenticity Is Cultivated in Rest

Here is what I most want you to carry out of this. The authenticity we are all chasing in our branding and our marketing and our media is not manufactured in the doing. It is cultivated in the resting. It is grown in the seasons where we come back to ourselves and remember who we are underneath all the output. You cannot perform your way into being real. You have to return your way into it.

You Are Right on Time

I know so many of you are in a rough season right now, so let me leave you with this. I see you. You are doing a beautiful job, and you are right on time, because this is exactly where God wants us, in the surrender. There is nothing more you have to do to get where you are going. You have already done the work, in this life and probably in a few others. If you are here, tapping in with me, you have already made it. What is left is to come back to loving yourself and to receiving what God has already done for you. It is almost a Jubilee. A time to celebrate, and to know that what is coming is already on its way.

This is the exact work I hold inside the Divine Alignment Mentorship. Five months of coming back to yourself so you can stop out-strategizing what you are actually here to heal. If this stirred something in you, the door is open.

Book a consultation with me at erinpatten.com. I will be on the other side of it.

You can find every episode of The MetaBusiness Millennial on YouTube at @iamerinpatten, and the hibiscus petal oil I use every day at rabeauty.co, the plant-based hair oil that started on my kitchen counter.