my month of leisure

on teaching my body that rest is safe, desire is holy, and pleasure is power.

For the month of August, I set out on a mission to change my relationship with productivity. My goal was deceptively simple: be as unproductive as possible, in an effort to teach my body that it is safe in a state of rest, leisure, and ease.

My brain already knows this truth—of course it is safe to rest. The human body requires it. Rest is the soil where presence takes root, where sensuality ripens, where Black Cat energy prowls and thrives. But my body? My body has never been convinced.

At its worst, this disbelief looked like 70+ hour workweeks, year stacked on year, as I poured myself into building my company while also trying to be the devoted wife, stepmom, and drinker that identity required. That devotion to productivity carried me headlong into a wall of burnout so thick it took two years to claw my way back. At its best, the disbelief looked like a performance of leisure—me reclining on a chaise with a book while my mind raced, my hands itching for something useful to do.

I’ve had a job since I was twelve years old. Other kids played sports; I worked. Summers spent babysitting Monday through Friday, 8 to 5. An internship at fourteen. Shifts at my family’s restaurant on school nights and weekends. In college I waitressed full-time to cover tuition, and after graduation I sometimes worked three jobs at once to make extra money. Purpose and productivity have always seemed baked into my bones. Being self-sufficient and financially independent was not just a point of pride—it was my identity.

What I did not realize until these last few years was just how much I had tied my worth to my output. Productivity wasn’t simply a value, it was my proof of existence. It was how I justified taking up space in the world, how I made sure no one could accuse me of being lazy, needy, or dependent. I had built a body—and a life—where worth and productivity were inseparable. And it was suffcating.

Through meditation, journaling, and the daily ritual of tarot, I began to slowly unravel that conditioning. I kept receiving the same gentle message: rest. Pause. Let yourself be suspended. I was told there is magic in the pause, that stillness does not mean stagnation, that inaction is not the absence of forward motion. Our worth is inherent. By existing, we are already worthy of every beautiful thing life has to offer—no proof required.

My mind understood this. My body rejected it. Each time I tried to sit in silence, or focus on a two-hour movie, or “do what felt good,” the itch for productivity rose like a rash. Stillness felt unsafe, indulgent, even dangerous.

So, at the beginning of August, I made a choice. Instead of leaping ahead in my mind to autumn—its romance, its seductions—I would root myself in summer’s sweltering present. I would savor the heat-drunk afternoons that beg you to sprawl with a book and a glass of iced tea, the mornings warm enough to sip coffee barefoot in the garden, the ripe peaches eaten over the sink, juice dripping down my wrist. And I wondered: what if I let this be the month of pure leisure? What if I trained my body, gently, to learn the art and the pleasure of rest?

Before I go further, I want to acknowledge the privilege embedded in this choice. My husband and I both spent years building our businesses to the point where stepping back is possible. We’ve invested well, and my company requires little of me now. We worked extremely hard for this privilege—but I know many people who work just as hard, if not harder, without access to the same opportunities. I hold that awareness alongside my gratitude. I know this experiment was a luxury not everyone can afford.

Still, the need in me was real. I could feel it humming in my bones: the need to recalibrate my body to a frequency of rest. So I set my intentions for August, knowing I would need parameters—guardrails to keep me from defaulting back into old patterns.

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My August Rules

• Push myself to be bored.

• Dedicate only two days a week to “getting shit done” (laundry, groceries, emails, TikTok videos, errands). The other five days: no work.

• Make to-do lists only for those two days. Otherwise, no lists allowed.

• Do what I feel like doing, when I feel like doing it.

• Be fully present with whatever I’m doing—no multitasking.

• Use my feelings as guideposts: Do I truly want this, or am I just trying to fill the void with productivity?

• Focus on the sensual—the taste, texture, sound, and scent of life.

• Move slowly. No rushing.

• Act only from authenticity. No performance.

• Limit time on social media, which pulls me out of myself.

• Tell no one.

What I Learned in the Pause

My best day of the month came almost immediately, on August 2, when I was still buzzing with excitement about this strange new experiment. I took myself on a daytime date. The morning stretched slow and indulgent: music playing as I did my hair and makeup, an outfit chosen simply because it made me feel beautiful, a few spritzes of perfume like a spell sealing my intention.

I lingered over lunch at a small bistro, ordering a charcuterie board far too large for one and a glass of Sauvignon Blanc. I read from The Safekeep, underlined passages, and scribbled in my leather journal. Between bites I watched the hum of the room, listening to fragments of conversation, savoring the way a salty slice of prosciutto met the sweetness of fig jam on my tongue. A woman stopped at my table, laughing as she said she and I were the only two women she’d ever seen order a glass of wine and a charcuterie board alone. I felt initiated into a secret club of women who date themselves.

Afterward I wandered into the record shop down the street. The owner and I traded words about jazz before I left with two albums tucked under my arm, then drifted into the Crocker Museum where I let classical music fill my ears as I moved slowly through an exhibit of French Revolution art. By the time I walked back to my car, I felt expansive, buoyant, aligned. When I slid into the driver’s seat my whole body exhaled, a sigh so deep it felt cellular. Nothing about the day was productive, and yet it had been perfect. Intentional. Sensual. Grounding. I glowed for days afterward, carrying with me the quiet confirmation that leisure could open the door to alignment.

Not every day felt so luminous. Some of my worst moments came when I realized how often I smuggled productivity into rest. I caught myself worrying over whether I had written enough for Substack, whether I had filmed enough TikToks, whether scrolling Pinterest under the guise of “inspiration” was just another form of working. It was humbling to see how quickly my mind reached for something—anything—to occupy itself. I had no idea how unfamiliar it was to sit with an unoccupied mind, how hard boredom would actually be.

But as the month went on, something began to loosen. Slowly, almost imperceptibly, my body unclenched. Leisure stopped feeling foreign. Guilt began to thin and fall away. I noticed I no longer rushed for anyone, not even myself. Emails waited until I wanted to answer them. Texts remained unopened until I had the space to respond fully. My thoughts shifted from responsibility to desire: what do I actually want to do, what feels good right now?

I made a ritual of my solo dates. I woke early for sunrise kayak hours. I painted my nails with deliberate slowness, knowing the polish would stay soft for hours and force me into stillness with a book. I began to delight in the ways leisure created its own texture and rhythm, the way it changed the shape of my days.

One of my greatest discoveries was how well my “two work days a week” structure supported all of this. Having a container for productivity meant I could fully release it on the other days. When a responsibility surfaced, I simply added it to my list for the next work day and returned to whatever I was doing in the present. Those designated days turned out to be so efficient, so focused, that I often felt more accomplished—and more free—than I ever had letting tasks sprawl endlessly across the week. Productivity no longer leaked into every crevice of my life. Instead, it had a place. And for the first time, rest had one too.

As August gave way to September, I noticed how different my body felt moving through the world. I was softer, slower, steadier. The frantic hum beneath my skin had quieted, replaced by something like trust—trust that I don’t need to earn my existence, trust that I am safe even in stillness.

What my body learned is that leisure is not laziness, it’s a deepening of life. It is a doorway into presence, into sensuality, into communion with myself and the universe. And it doesn’t require a perfectly cleared calendar or a month-long experiment. It can live in the daily choices: leaving an email unopened until the right moment, lingering a little longer over coffee, listening to what my body actually wants instead of what my mind insists must be done.

As autumn approaches with its own rhythms of harvest and change, I don’t want to lose what summer taught me. I want to carry it with me like a charm: the reminder that rest is fertile, that slowness is a form of power, that joy itself can be productive. The world will always ask us to hurry, to perform, to prove—but we can choose to move differently.

For me, August was proof. Proof that I can choose softness over striving, presence over productivity, magic over measurement. Proof that when I surrender to leisure, I do not disappear. I expand.

Note: I read voraciously in August—for me, reading is pure pleasure, never work. Through some magical mixture of intention, curiosity, and serendipity, every book I reached for seemed to circle the same theme: seduction and sensuality. It was as if my subconscious had conspired with the universe, guiding me not just to rest but to the deeper art of seducing myself. Simple leisure would not suffice; I needed to steep in desire, in pleasure, in longing and allure. I may write more on this in the future, but for now I want to share my reading list, in case you feel called to embark on your own experiment:

• The Safekeep - Yael van der Wouden

• The Art of Seduction - Robert Greene

• Sacred Seduction - Kitty Cavalier

• Henry and June - Anaïs Nin

• Unbound: A Woman’s Guide To Power - Kasia Urbaniak