Welcome to The Daily Ascent. I'm Molly Carmel, and this is the podcast I always wish existed, a bite-sized, on-the-ground, spiritual note that can shift your thinking and your outlook on life to help make us all a little bit more awake, alive, and ascending. So I want to talk about the part of healing and honestly, like the part of living that I feel like we're not warned enough about. And it's not the hard conversation and it's not the big session and it's not the long day where you gave everything you had, although those are very important.
I kind of want to talk about the after. So I recently did this month-long EMDR intensive. It was a big piece of trauma work and it really, really changed my life. But the thing I want to talk about today isn't the work itself, which, you know, I'll get to.
It's actually about after it, because when I finished this three-hour intensive session, I went home and I was wrecked. I was wrecked. And honestly, not in a bad way, because it was an amazingly healing session. And so it wasn't like something went wrong.
I just was completely emptied out and I was tired for days. I couldn't focus. I was just like very out of it. And honestly, all I wanted to do was lie on the couch with Danny and like maybe watch TV.
I'm not even sure that I wanted to do that. Like mine, like Modern Family, like not even like intense TV, just kind of nothingness. And really, it was like my first instinct was to be judgmental of it. Like, okay, the work is done and I'm ready to be in life.
You know, let's get back to it. I don't want to fall behind. I don't want to not want to work out on a Saturday or a Sunday and I don't want to be so tired. And maybe there's something wrong with me.
Maybe I'm getting sick. You know, the spin cycle. And then my friend Betsy said something that really cut through all of it. She said, I just want to remind you, because I was just saying to her like, I'm so tired.
I don't really want to do anything. And she just tapped in and she said, you know, you just did so much heavy lifting of your spirit. Of course, you're tired. You really need to integrate it.
And I was like, huh, ain't that. I mean, I would definitely say that to Betsy. And I was like, yeah, of course I'm tired. Like it was the most obvious thing in the whole world.
It was right in front of me and I was completely miskip. And a friend of mine had invited me to dinner that Friday night after my EMDR. And I was like, oh my God, Louie, yes, count me in. Can't wait to see you.
And when I got home, I had to cancel because I was genuinely spiritually incapacitated. I literally couldn't go. And I kind of felt guilty about it. Like maybe I was being fragile or making excuses, but I wasn't.
I just was completely emptied out. And I think we all have these moments. And I want to be clear, not just after therapy, right? After you finally have this conversation you've been avoiding for months, or after a week where you've left it all on the field at work, or after sitting with a friend through their grief and absorbing some of it into your own body, or after making a big leap that required so much of your own resources.
And these are moments where we open ourselves up emotionally, where we're vulnerable, where we've given it our all, really showed up. And then afterward, we're spent. And I don't know if you're like me, but instead of honoring that, we judge it, right? We think we should bounce back faster.
We think that the exhaustion means that maybe something's wrong or resting doesn't fit into our plan. But this emotional spiritual work is honestly, in my experience, sometimes even harder than physical work. And if you went to a really hard workout class or you ran a marathon, nobody questions why you need to rest the next day, right? Nobody says like, why are you so tired?
You know, you just ran a marathon. But when you do something that takes everything your heart and spirit have, we often just expect ourselves to like snap right back, right? To integrate it instantly, to just be good to go. But integration isn't instant necessarily.
Actually, integration is its own thing. And it has its own timeline. And I just don't feel like we talk enough about this part. And so that brings me to our pocket stage today.
Lane Muller, he's a friend of the show. And he has a book called Sabbath, Finding Rest, Renewal, and Delight in Our Busy Lives. And he writes about a friend going through cancer treatment who finally says to his doctors, it's like you plant seeds in my body. And every week you tear the seeds out of the ground to see if they've grown any roots yet.
We have to let the seeds that have been planted get a chance to germinate, take root, and grow. We have to leave them alone. We have to let them be. Let me read that again for those of you in the back.
It's like you plant seeds in my body. And every week you tear the seeds out of the ground to see if they've grown any roots yet. We have to let the seeds that have been planted get a chance to germinate, to take root and grow. We have to leave them alone.
We have to let them be. And honestly, that's what I was doing on the couch, right? I was tearing up the seeds that I had just planted every time I judged myself for being tired. Every time I told myself, you know, you should go to yoga tomorrow morning, right?
I was pulling the roots out of the ground to check if they've grown it. Or I was being impatient with if the roots were okay or if the seeds actually planted. And like, we know that that's not how seeds work. And it's definitely not how emotional, spiritual integration works either.
And so our word of the day today is integrate. Integrate means to make things whole, to bring the pieces together. And listen, that just can't be rushed. I wish it could.
And when we've been through something big, whether it's deep therapeutic work or a conversation that changed a relationship or a week that took everything out of you, there's a period afterwards where your system needs to catch up. Like your body needs to catch up with what your heart just experienced. Your nervous system needs to recalibrate. Your spirit needs to get grounded and land in this new plant bed.
And let me be clear, like that period is not downtime or laziness. It's integration. It's the part where all the seeds that we plant take root. And this reading is really saying that healing requires time for the body and the soul and the spirit to reorganize themselves in a new way.
And if we keep digging up the seeds to see if they've grown yet, or we become impatient with the speed in which they're growing, they can't grow. So we have to let them be. And we have to trust our need for dormancy. And I don't know, like, I feel like we just live in this culture that celebrates breakthroughs, but really ignores what comes after.
Like we love the big moment, the reveal, right? The insight. We love the brave decision, but we don't talk about the days that follow when you're exhausted and foggy and raw and not performing your best. And that rawness isn't a setback.
It's a sign that something actually happened, right? That it's a sign that you open something. So of course there's going to be tenderness, right? To the touch.
Of course, there's going to be tiredness and fatigue. Like your spirit just ran a marathon and now it's recovering and recovery requires rest. And you know, my friend Betsy was so right. Like I did heavy lifting of my spirit and my spirit needed time to heal.
Quiet, careful time, right? And for me, it needed someone to say, of course you're tired. That's wisdom. Honor it.
So if you've really, if you've been through something recently and you're like nodding your head at this episode and judging yourself for not bouncing back fast enough, please hear me. You're not behind. You're not composting. You're just integrating.
You're letting the seeds take root and you can give yourself permission to rest, really rest without guilt and without the voice in your head telling you that you need to be doing more. And to be honest, that's where real transformation happens. Not in the moment, in the silence that follows. And listen, I am right here with you, Ascenders, learning that the rest after the work is just as sacred as the work itself.
And if these episodes are speaking to you, go open up your Instagram and make a little story post and say, come on in, Ascenders, we're waiting for you. Or whatever, or whatever your way of spreading the daily ascent love is, you know? I'm so excited. I want to grow our Ascender crew.
And until next time, we rise together. See you soon.