06/10/2026
I've been reading a book that talks about "the relaxed woman," and it's been resonating deeply.
Lately, I've been simplifying my life, slowing down, and being more intentional with my time and energy.
Maybe the relaxed woman isn't someone we're becoming.
Maybe she's who we've been all along, waiting to be remembered. ✨
"As women, we are soft, strong, fierce, fragile, vulnerable, resilient, embodied, intuitive, and deeply interconnected with one another. We are also stressed, overwhelmed, and exhausted. Our desire to care and nurture has been exploited by our culture. Our capacity for kindness and compassion has been abused. Our hope for empowerment and equality has been manipulated into exhausting obligations and unrealistic expectations, leaving us feeling like there is never enough time and always too much to do. We have become a society of rushing women. Overburdened women. Exhausted women. Without seeing other women role-model what it means to be relaxed, to be at ease, to be free, many of us have felt anxious, apologetic, afraid, and ashamed all our lives. When the women who love us are unable to rest, relax, and honor their needs, it can be very difficult for us to do so ourselves.
In a society dominated by patriarchy, full of inequality, and obsessed with productivity, the relaxed woman is a rare being.
Most of us have never met one, and becoming one can feel like an impossibility. We may have absorbed the manipulative cultural messaging that "relaxation" signifies laziness, a lack of ambition, indulgence, selfishness, resignation, and complacency. When we are scared of judgment and criticism, it can feel safer to conform to expectations of perfectionism, self-sacrifice, people-pleasing, and toxic productivity than to explore a more relaxed way of living.
And yet, even though we may never have met a relaxed woman, when we hear the words relaxed and woman together, they often resonate deep within us, reawakening a way of being that we know intuitively. Like a magic spell, they open a secret door, revealing to us a new hope, a new paradigm, a new possibility."
