#394: Permission to Rest: You Can’t Heal Past Trauma Until You’re Willing to Do This 1 Thing

Kevin Lowe: It can be disappointment.

Kevin Lowe: It can be something physical, something emotional. All of that is trauma.

Kevin Lowe: And today, what I want you to understand is that, first and foremost, you have a reason to need a pause from life.

Kevin Lowe: You have a reason to need to just take a step back, to take a breather, to take a little afternoon nap from life, because you've just endured a lot.

Kevin Lowe: And so today, we're going to be talking about why that is, how to accomplish it, and what's going to happen in the end.

Kevin Lowe: So, my friend, that's all what's happening today.

Kevin Lowe: Of course, I'm your host, Kevin Lowe. And as always, I am so happy you're here and can't wait for us to dive in.

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Kevin Lowe: Can understand that the essence of what I'm talking about is honestly quite simple.

Kevin Lowe: The strongest thing you can do, the best decision you can make after experiencing trauma in your life is honestly going to be probably one of the hardest. That is to slow down.

Kevin Lowe: Because for some reason, we are bred to believe that we need to push through.

Kevin Lowe: We need to keep going. We need to move a little bit faster.

Kevin Lowe: Because the faster you move, well, the faster you get out of the hard times.

Kevin Lowe: But in fact, what I found is that the opposite is true, is that we have to give ourselves time to slow down, to reflect, to understand that we've been through a lot.

Kevin Lowe: Our physical bodies, our emotional, spiritual, all of it has just endured a lot with this traumatic event.

Kevin Lowe: And at some point in time, we have to give ourselves time to just pause, to rest, to recover.

Kevin Lowe: Because the simple truth is, is that some wounds, they take time to heal.

Kevin Lowe: And the deepest wounds, the emotional ones, they're the ones that oftentimes take the longest.

Kevin Lowe: The wounds that no one else sees. It's only the wounds that you feel.

Kevin Lowe: The wounds that you feel in the middle of the night. When you're remembering the loss of the person who you loved, who's no longer lying next to you.

Kevin Lowe: It's the loss of the life that you wanted. The dreams that never came true.

Kevin Lowe: It's that kind of hurt that I'm talking about.

Kevin Lowe: And I believe these invisible wounds, they require more than just time. They require patience.

Kevin Lowe: They require grace.

Kevin Lowe: And they require kindness to ourselves.

Kevin Lowe: So if you're in a state in your life where you're feeling like you need to just keep moving, you got to keep hustling.

Kevin Lowe: You need to do the next thing because, well, there's so much to do and you don't want to stop and you don't want to think about the hurt and the pain.

Kevin Lowe: My friend, I'm just here to tell you that obviously you're the only one who ever knows when it's time.

Kevin Lowe: But at some point, you're going to have to just give yourself time to sit in it, to understand it, to feel it, to let yourself move through it, through the act of taking a pause, by taking a break.

Kevin Lowe: Remember, this is an afternoon nap from life.

Kevin Lowe: If you want to use a metaphor, think of trauma as a hurricane, a storm.

Kevin Lowe: And after the hurricane comes through, there's going to be damage.

Kevin Lowe: There's going to be limbs that are down, trees knocked over, shingles ripped off of the roof.

Kevin Lowe: And you can't just rush outside and start fixing things. You can't immediately start watering the grass.

Kevin Lowe: You can't start immediately mowing the yard, putting trees back up.

Kevin Lowe: No, you have to first be able to survey the damage, to understand what you're left with, what damage was caused.

Kevin Lowe: What is the impact going to be? And the essence here is if you rush out too soon, all you're doing, my friend, is you're trying to rebuild your life on top of the debris.

Kevin Lowe: You no longer have a solid foundation. You're building upon wreckage of disappointment.

Kevin Lowe: That's no way to build a new life. So instead, if you take a pause, if you give yourself the time, the grace to survey the damage, That little bit of a pause, that little bit of a break can give you the time to have the mental clarity you need to come up with a game plan, to understand what you're looking at, and therefore you can begin to move forward.

Kevin Lowe: Now, when I talk about taking a pause, this intentional pause, or as I was using the relation to an afternoon nap from life, what does this exactly look like in terms of being sure that you're getting the most out of this time?

Kevin Lowe: Well, I broke it down into three simple steps.

Kevin Lowe: The first step, and is oftentimes the most difficult, is literally giving yourself permission to take the pause, to take that afternoon nap from life.

Kevin Lowe: Because at some point in time, you have to give yourself permission to just stop.

Kevin Lowe: You keep going, you keep striving, you keep trying to do the thing, but at some point you have to just realize, you know what? Maybe I just need to take a break.

Kevin Lowe: Maybe I need to stop trying, stop doing, and I need to just sit in it to understand that it's okay for me to not be doing, to not be moving forward because I've just been through a lot.

Kevin Lowe: The fact is, is that in the pause, in the silent, it isn't weakness.

Kevin Lowe: That's where strength and clarity is found.

Kevin Lowe: It's where you can begin to understand what you're even feeling.

Kevin Lowe: Because when we continue to move forward in life, always pursuing and pushing through because we don't want to face what we've gone through, my friend, we're never going to have that clarity.

Kevin Lowe: We're constantly dragging a bunch of crap with us that doesn't belong.

Kevin Lowe: You have to be able to give yourself a chance to just catch your breath, to understand that it's going to be okay and to understand how you're feeling.

Kevin Lowe: My next little step here is understanding that the type of soul-nurturing rest I'm talking about, it's not just physical, it's emotional, it's spiritual.

Kevin Lowe: And in this moment, it may give you the opportunity to finally feel the feels, to scream, to cry, to rage, or maybe it's to laugh. Maybe it is to cry.

Kevin Lowe: Maybe it is to find somebody to lean on, a pillow to hug, a dog, your best friend to snuggle with.

Kevin Lowe: And it's in these moments, I believe, when we can actually begin to heal, when we begin to finally allow ourselves the opportunity to let the emotions come out.

Kevin Lowe: Now, again, I'm not here to pretend this is easy, and I believe every single one of us are on our own timeline.

Kevin Lowe: Some people can go through this immediately. Some people, it may take years.

Kevin Lowe: I did not fully get to a point where I was ready to move through what happened to me, becoming blind, for the better part of about 10 years.

Kevin Lowe: Now, in that 10 years, of course, I cried. I struggled.

Kevin Lowe: Even to this day, there are days that I mourn the loss of the life that I thought I was going to have.

Kevin Lowe: I mourn the loss of my ability to see. It doesn't mean that this makes everything better.

Kevin Lowe: No, it just gives you the opportunity to finally move into the next chapter of life free of all the hurt and all the disappointment that you've been carrying with you.

Kevin Lowe: It gives you an opportunity to just free yourself of all of that crap and get yourself where you can enter into a new season of life.

Kevin Lowe: The third step in this process of taking an intentional pause, a pause with a purpose, a pause that I hope and pray will make a difference, is being willing to ask yourself the tough questions.

Kevin Lowe: How am I really doing? How am I really feeling?

Kevin Lowe: Not what I pretend to be, not what I post on social media, not what I tell my family or my friends.

Kevin Lowe: How am I really doing?

Kevin Lowe: Where I am right now, what do I need? What do I want? What do I dream about?

Kevin Lowe: What do I want to come true?

Kevin Lowe: Not guarded by this idea of, well, dreams never come true and there's all this hurt and disappointment.

Kevin Lowe: No, forget about all of that stuff right now. I want you to think about what you really and truly want, what you desire.

Kevin Lowe: This is just between you and you.

Kevin Lowe: Ask yourself, where am I hurting? How do I feel right now? Where is the pain?

Kevin Lowe: Where am I carrying the burden? You can answer these questions however you like.

Kevin Lowe: Maybe it's as simple as you getting out a journal and journaling each one of these questions every day when you wake up.

Kevin Lowe: Or maybe it's you just literally talking it out to yourself.

Kevin Lowe: It's you lying in bed and thinking about these questions each morning.

Kevin Lowe: It's you just literally giving yourself time to be with you, the person who needs the attention right now.

Kevin Lowe: The biggest thing here is I want you to understand that you matter, that your life matters.

Kevin Lowe: And just as maybe a little bonus item for how to approach this intentional pause is seek out sources of inspiration, of motivation, of things that might have you thinking about things in a way you hadn't thought of before.

Kevin Lowe: For myself, that comes mostly by way of a book.

Kevin Lowe: I love me a good audio book. Thank goodness for Audible. They make life so easy.

Kevin Lowe: Go download an audio book. I mean, yes, if you're into reading a regular book, go for it, but maybe you're at a point in your life where you don't feel like reading, your eyes are tired, you want to just be able to lie in your bed and listen to something.

Kevin Lowe: Well, go grab a book. Find a book about something that interests you.

Kevin Lowe: A book about a real-life story of somebody overcoming something that maybe you've gone through.

Kevin Lowe: Something that I guarantee you, by listening to their story, you might find something that they say that is that little piece that you needed.

Kevin Lowe: I know for myself, that was the case.

Kevin Lowe: When I was in that period of my life, when I wasn't ready to move forward, I was still holding on to the life that I had wanted.

Kevin Lowe: And it was only because of a book that helped to set me free.

Kevin Lowe: So don't underestimate the power of listening to a book during this period where you're just taking a pause from life, from pushing forward.

Kevin Lowe: Now, I understand that you may think, yeah, this is great, but he doesn't know that I still have a life I have to live.

Kevin Lowe: And yes, I get it. I understand that you may still have to go to work.

Kevin Lowe: You may still have a family you have to take care of.

Kevin Lowe: But what I'm talking about is you just pausing in the essence of you're not constantly pushing forward.

Kevin Lowe: Instead, you're just putting a pause on all those plans All those ideas Even if it means you telling your family Your spouse, your loved ones Hey, listen.

Kevin Lowe: I got to just take a break for a bit. I need to take a pause from all of this stuff that we've been doing and pursuing.

Kevin Lowe: And I just need to take a break for a little bit. And maybe that means over the course of a week, over the course of a month, maybe it is just a few days.

Kevin Lowe: Enough time and space for you to get clear on you.

Kevin Lowe: I want to leave you with one last image in your mind to help you illustrate the power of the pause.

Kevin Lowe: I would love for you to think of your life like a bow and arrow.

Kevin Lowe: If you've ever shot a bow and arrow before, you know that you have to pull the string back.

Kevin Lowe: You have the arrow locked on and you have to pull the string and it's hard.

Kevin Lowe: It's hard to pull that string all the way back.

Kevin Lowe: But what you do, you pull it back.

Kevin Lowe: Before you release it, what do you do? You pause.

Kevin Lowe: You steady your arm. the tension is eased off and you're holding the string the arrow is in place it's ready to soar forward give yourself time to pause to aim to see exactly where you want that arrow to go and when that arrow is held in the pause it's not failing it's not giving up on life it's literally preparing to soar forward it is gaining its potential for greatness you my friend or that arrow.

Kevin Lowe: And the pause is literally you just taking an opportunity to take a break, to take a pause so that you can soar forward with direction, with intention into the life that you want.

Kevin Lowe: My friend, I get it. Life isn't easy.

Kevin Lowe: I'm not here to pretend that it is. And that is why I just want to encourage you with today's episode that it's okay that I understand that you've been through a lot of stuff in life.

Kevin Lowe: And I get that you might be struggling. And that is why I want to give you the encouragement, the permission to just take a pause.

Kevin Lowe: My name, of course, is Kevin Lowe, your host, as well as an inspirational public speaker.

Kevin Lowe: Matter of fact, if you belong to an organization, a company, anyone looking for a speaker for your next event, please be sure to go check out my website, which is kevinspeaks.org.

Kevin Lowe: I have that inside of today's show notes.

Kevin Lowe: I am more than happy to get to speak with you or anybody at your company or organization about coming on as an inspirational speaker.

Kevin Lowe: That link is in the show notes. Again, kevinspeaks.org is the website.

Kevin Lowe: Listen, I hope that today's episode, more than anything else.

Kevin Lowe: Just gave you permission to take a break and to realize that what you've been through is meaningful. It's a lot.

Kevin Lowe: That it's okay for you to just take a break from a life.

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