„Turtle’i” õppimine

Eight months with the Rest & Restore Protocol

autor: Nicola-Jane le Breton

When I began the Rest & Restore Protocol, my body showed me an image I have never forgotten. In a Focusing session that first week, it said, very clearly, that it wanted to be a cat curling up in a dark, safe, quiet little basket, away from other people. Not for an afternoon. For as long as it took.

I didn’t yet understand how much I needed that rest.

For years I had been running on adrenaline—busy, capable, useful, always a little ahead of myself. I thought of that hum as energy. It turned out to be the opposite: a nervous system in permanent low-grade alarm, masking an exhaustion so old and so deep that I’d stopped being able to feel it. My iron was low. My sleep was broken. My neck and head ached. And underneath it all was a tiredness I had been outrunning for most of my adult life. The RRP asked me to stop running and let it surface.

What I remember most vividly from those early weeks is the sense of brakes coming on inside my nervous system. It was as though someone had stepped hard on the brake pedal of a car that had been going very fast for a very long time—not a complete halt, but a dramatic slowing, down almost to a standstill. For a couple of weeks I more or less flopped. I dropped a lot of balls; I let myself be sick. Luckily it coincided with a two-week holiday in Thailand, and that’s exactly what I did—allowing myself whole days of doing almost nothing. There was simply no way forward until I had rested.

And as I rested, the image deepened. The cat became a turtle—a giant, ancient turtle—and I was held inside it, carried in its slow, viscous, protective dark. The feeling wasn’t numbness, exactly. It was closer to being shielded from the pressures that had driven me for so long: soothed, held, reassured. It was, my body told me, like being put on bed rest: I didn’t have to do any of the things I usually did; I only had to rest and let myself be cared for. There was a part of me on that bed rest, and my work was to be tender with her—to give her the time she needed to recover, not to push her on as I always had. So I let the turtle hold me, and thanked it for slowing me right down.

What the RRP actually is

The Rest & Restore Protocol is a guided listening program—five hours of music in all—from Unyte, developed from the work of the neuroscientist Dr Stephen Porges (whose name you may know from the Safe & Sound Protocol) with the audio innovator Anthony Gorry. Where the SSP works with the ventral vagal pathway—associated with social connection and safety—the RRP works with the oldest branch of the nervous system, the dorsal vagal pathway, whose gift is the capacity to rest, repair and recover. Its music isn’t filtered so much as composed around the body’s own slow rhythms—heartbeat, breath, digestion—gently inviting the whole system to settle.

I’m not a scientist, and this is a personal story, not a clinical trial—so I won’t try to explain why it works, or promise it will do for you what it did for me. I’ll simply tell you what happened in my body. I kept a daily journal throughout my first experience of the protocol, and I’ve drawn on those notes here. (For transparency: BrainArts—William Bolle’s practice—gave me a free year’s access to the RRP in exchange for writing this. The experience and opinions here are entirely my own.) My first pass through the program took a little over two months.

The discipline of less

The most surprising thing about the RRP is how little of it you do. You don’t put on headphones and absorb five hours of music. You begin with one minute. Then a rest day. Then two minutes. Then a rest day. I built up over weeks—ten seconds at a time in places—from one minute to two, four, six, eight, ten. The instruction that kept coming back, from William and from the protocol itself, was: less is more. Better to go too slow than too fast.

This runs against my conditioning, and I suspect against most people’s: we want the full dose, the fast result, the box ticked. The RRP asks for the opposite—small sips, long pauses, a day of rest between each listening so the body can integrate. Learning to honour that pacing was itself part of the medicine. It taught me, in miniature, the thing my whole life was trying to learn: that rest is not something you earn after the work is done.

What changed

The changes came so gently, so incrementally, that within any given week I could barely point to them—and yet, looking back across eight months, they are unmistakable. This has been a quiet, cumulative kind of transformation, not a dramatic one.

The clearest example is sleep. I listen to the RRP most nights before bed, while I do some gentle yin yoga, and somewhere over these months my sleep has transformed. I fall asleep within about fifteen minutes now, where once it would take far longer; I wake less, and wake clearer. Early on, I also found I could doze again—drop into a soft afternoon nap, something I hadn’t managed in years. It all happened so minutely, night by night, that I almost didn’t notice—until something tested it. Recently I had to stay up late several nights running, working at the computer, and still fell easily into a deep, solid sleep. The old me, wired and wakeful after a late night on a screen, simply couldn’t have done that. (One thing to know: the RRP can make you dream more, and more vividly. If you listen right before bed and don’t like that, try moving it earlier in the day.)

Something shifted, too, in how I arrive in my own body. I used to wake not-quite-in myself, as though there were a membrane I had to push through each morning—an hour or more of yoga, meditation and exercise just to clear enough space to feel in my body and connected to the earth. Now, most mornings, I can simply get up and be here. It’s as though the RRP has given me back my body—dissolved some old separation, harmonised something that used to feel split off and bottled up.

Then came the changes I really didn’t expect from a set of music tracks.

My reactivity began to soften. One day, early in the protocol, I witnessed a car crash outside our home and my whole system went into hyper-alert—old trauma flooding up. I listened to a short RRP track later that night and felt myself finally settle. Another time I received a message from a friend that, in the past, would have hijacked me for days: chest tight, body braced, thoughts looping. I noticed it, did my listening, sat with the activated parts of me—and by evening I had moved from a highly reactive state to something I can only call equanimity, where I could see the whole situation rather than just the threat.

I want to be careful here, because this is important: the RRP did not do that for me. As I wrote in my journal that day, I had to do the work—the listening, the Focusing, the turning toward those frightened parts. What the RRP seemed to do was switch off the hypervigilance enough that the work became possible. It widened the doorway. I still had to walk through it.

My boundaries grew firmer, naturally. I found myself able to say no—to a friend in crisis I genuinely couldn’t rescue, to pressure I would once have folded under—without the usual storm of guilt. A friend who’d completed the protocol described the same thing: feeling more resilient, less porous. For me it feels like a steadiness underneath, a sense of being held from within that simply wasn’t there before.

The longer arc

What I’m most grateful for is that this didn’t fade. Unlike the usual rush of enthusiasm that wears off once something stops being new, this has felt sustained and structural—an ongoing resource rather than a passing reprieve. I am, to my own quiet astonishment, ever so much more resilient than I used to be; things that would once have toppled me now simply roll past. I feel more regulated, more steadily myself—and when I do tip into dysregulation, it no longer feels like my identity the way it once did. I know now that it’s temporary, and that there are pathways back.

I should say that I have rarely used the RRP entirely on its own. For the past six months I have woven it together with occasional doses of its companion, the Safe & Sound Protocol, which works not with rest but with social connection and safety. If the RRP is the shell I can retreat into, the SSP is the door I can open to come back out toward the world—and together they’ve given me a balance I’ve never known. (I’ve written about the SSP, and what it did for a lifelong outsider in groups, in a companion review.)

Because there is, I learned, such a thing as too far down. About two months in, the deep rest tipped into something too slow and too inward. I felt so withdrawn from the world, and so deeply challenged by any social interaction, that the turtle’s depths had become a place I couldn’t easily rise from. That’s when I reached out to William to restart the SSP—which immediately seemed to bring me back into a healthier balance. I used it regularly until I felt steady between the two poles again, and now I might turn to it only once or twice a fortnight, whereas the RRP I use almost daily.

Somewhere across these eight months, I stopped being carried by the turtle and became it—learning to dive down into the depths of my own accord, and to rise again when it’s time to meet the world.

A few cautions

This is not a magic pill, and it shouldn’t be sold as one. There were wobbly stretches. In one low, sick week I genuinely wondered whether the RRP was stirring things up rather than soothing them, and whether I’d dropped too far into shutdown. Those moments are, I think, part of the unwinding—old exhaustion and old grief surfacing so they can finally move—but they’re real, and they’re why the protocol’s emphasis on slowness, rest days and a guide who knows what they’re doing matters so much. William was always reachable, always steady, and that mattered more than I can say.

I should be honest, too, about what it hasn’t done. I’m still someone who tends toward busyness and overwhelm—a deeply set pattern I may well be working with for the rest of my life. What’s different now is that there are more pauses, more rest, woven through the busyness. Only eight months in, I’m still early in letting that spaciousness take root; the RRP has diluted an old pattern, not erased it. I wouldn’t want you to expect it to fix or change you—this is a continuum, not a cure.

I’d recommend: don’t do this in a rush, or alone in the dark with no support. Have someone safe you can reach. Pair it, if you can, with a practice that helps you listen to what surfaces—for me that’s Focusing, but it could be anything that lets you turn toward your inner experience with kindness rather than trying to fix it. And take the “less is more” instruction seriously, even when every busy cell in you wants to push ahead. It’s worth remembering, too, that the RRP is a listening program, not a medical treatment—something to sit alongside other care, not to replace it.

Kas ma soovitaksin seda?

Yes—sincerely and warmly. I can’t promise it will do for you what it did for me; every nervous system is its own. I can only tell you that the RRP helped my body remember how to rest, softened a reactivity I’d carried my whole life, and left me steadier than I’ve ever been. It taught me, slowly, that I am allowed to be the turtle—to descend into the deep sea within when I need to—and that resting, far from being the end of my strength, turns out to be its source.

Nicola-Jane le Breton on kirjanik ning Focusing-koolitaja ja -praktik, kes elab Rockinghamis Lääne-Austraalias. Ta töötab organisatsioonis Befriend kogukonna lugude loojana, aidates kaasa kaasavamate ja ühtekuuluvamate kogukondade arendamisele.