Shake the dust. It’s a sentiment we should all be getting on board with. The swirl of modern life looks like being perpetually busy but often sedentary and confused about how best to rest: the conflict between finding horizontal moments and allowing ourselves to lie in or pushing through the exhaustion and moving our bodies (even if that means moving them towards being even more busy).
Pip Roberts is a practitioner urging us to learn our own unique ways we need to rest. Her morning sessions, Shake The Dust, are hugely popular and can be accessed online - and while she’s helping people get their bodies moving, she’s definitely an advocate for some heavy lying down. Disco naps, specifically. A yoga teacher, mentor and business owner whose flow comes in waves, Pip’s energy is all about tuning in and listening to our own bodies. As a fellow proponent for whole being and someone who just happens to have taken time off from drinking, we asked Pip a few questions about rest, growth and movement from her home and studio in Bristol.
Rest is a big part of your practice and how you teach. But you don’t only offer ‘restorative’ yoga. Your Shake The Dust morning workouts are hugely popular, but so are your yoga nidra sessions. How do you define rest and what does it mean to you?
Rest is a place for me where life gets reconciled.
It’s a space for things to rise up as much as it is a space for things to fade away. It’s a place of naturalness and being, with whatever there is. It is (sometimes sadly) absolutely not always a place of relaxation but sometimes grit and determination and resistance and anything else that decides to join the moment. And that is the practice.
It’s an absolute essential in my daily life, even if life is life-ing so hard that there’s only 5 minutes to rest, I will take that time.
I also offer practices to help us build a reliant nervous system and body - because I want that for my own cells. Resting into a soothed nervous system is way less of a job that one that is in fight or flight.
There are loads of social factors as to why we’re not resting like we should; for you, what was the trigger that catalysed your desire to make rest more of a priority?
There was no one lightbulb moment, more a very slow learning through my daily practices. A steady compounding of journaled out thoughts (I journal after each practice I take). These slow growing habits kind of sneak up on you, then you look around and it’s like WOW what the heck happened there?!
You’re a business owner, a mentor, ambassador; you head down to Cornwall often, you surf, you’re running retreats and programmes – what’s your relationship between movement and rest? How do you balance out the busy?
I genuinely think that growing older and experiencing more of life and perhaps becoming busier in running my studio has shifted the energy levels I can offer my spiritual practice. And in order for it to bring balance to my life it has found a steadiness and a slowness.
I still love movement, I’m very into daily movement, love the strength Pilates brings me (but probably not the actual exercises themselves) and running, but rest as a practice is currently my practice (and I’m open to this shifting again at some point).
Do you think you’re living a life you imagined for yourself when you were younger? What do you think the difference is between who you thought you were going to be and who you are now?
I am so far from the person I thought I would be. And I’m actually really proud of that.
I feel like I found the strength to shift away from expectations and “the path”. Moving out of biotech (feels like a lifetime ago) and into something that makes my cells sing was not an easy or unscary move. But here we are… and it’s going really nicely.
What would you tell your younger self knowing what you know now?
Listen babe. Really listen.
Can you list some of your favourite things that help you feel relaxed and rested?
Yoga Nidra (if you’ve not tried this practice yet then please do yourself a favour - also coined non-sleep deep rest by huberman, but we like to honour its roots and you can find recordings of this on my website - press play and. Lay down, nothing else to “do”), and seawater (there’s nothing like a post surf lay down for max rest and relax vibes - and exhaustion if was out too long!)
What’s your secret to a good night’s sleep?
Going to bed around 9pm seems to meet my body’s needs for sleep before it wakes up at 5:30am (this early wake up is more the issue than the good nights sleep for me these days) since my body gave up on alcohol over 2 years ago my sleep quality is so much better (thanks @ouraring for this info)
Who is another Independent Spirit we should be learning from?
Kate Roath from wild source apothecary - an amazing human, so funny, so sound, and has all we need to get a glow from our skin whilst also creating beautiful ritual around it and nourishing our nervous systems.