06/12/2025
🌙 On sleep, rest, and meeting one's tiredness
One of the things I hear often after Shiatsu treatments is about sleep. People who haven't slept through the night in months suddenly do. One client described it beautifully: "I have met my tiredness."
What does it mean to "meet" your tiredness rather than just being tired?
I believe it is this moment where the 'pushing through' stops for a moment. During a Shiatsu session, often something shifts. The warm futon and blankets, the gentle movements and pressure points - they help us drift into a state between waking and sleeping. At least for an hour. Not quite asleep, but deeply resting. Unwinding.
This can feel unfamiliar. Some people feel very heavy after a treatment, like they could never get up from the futon. Others feel a bit flu-like. This isn't a problem - it's the body responding to the treatment and maybe meeting the tiredness it's been carrying. When someone has been running on empty, stopping can feel uncomfortable.
These sensations usually pass within 24 hours. What often happens is that people sleep much longer than usual that first night after a treatment. What's happening is that the body may have shifted into genuine rest mode. It's not always pleasant in the moment, but it's often what allows deeper recovery to begin.
This unwinding is very nourishing. It's part of our rhythm - the pendulum swing from activity to rest and back to activity again.
Rest is not something we need to buy though and is not limited to sleep. It takes many forms: cuddles with loved ones (human or pet), creative time, laughter, simply lying down and doing nothing.
What Shiatsu offers is something specific within this larger landscape of rest - the experience of skilled, compassionate touch where you don't have to manage anything, achieve anything, or even relax "correctly." Someone else tends to you. There's a particular grace in that kind of surrender, in receiving care from another person.
When we allow ourselves to be held and cared for in this way, our bodies often respond with a depth of rest we'd forgotten was there for us. That's when people sleep through the night again. That's when they meet their tiredness - and finally rest.
