In this episode, I sit down with my dear friend Emmie Rae — writer, teacher, founder of The Daily Rest, and one of the clearest voices I know on rest, receptivity, and doing hard things gently. Emmie lives in Tokyo and has built a whole world around softness, devotion, and the kind of spaciousness that doesn’t make you less ambitious but makes you more HONEST.

If you’ve been rethinking success, craving more spaciousness, or trying to build a creative business that doesn’t cost you your aliveness, this episode is for you. 

This is a beautiful one for anyone building a creative business, deepening their relationship to their voice, or learning how to make expansion feel safe in the body.

We dive into

🪽 Doing hard things gently — using fear as a lighthouse instead of a stop sign, and learning how to let growth be challenging without making it violent.

🪽  The addiction to edge — why expansion can become addictive, and what it means to actively choose sweetness, slowness, and enoughness after a big season of becoming.

🪽  Rest as a creative practice — not rest as optimization, but rest as a portal into intuition, nervous system regulation, and real creative leadership.

🪽  Soft business and spacious success — building a business that supports your life instead of consuming it, and refusing the cultural script that says scale must come at the expense of softness.

🪽 Nervous system capacity and business growth — what happens when momentum arrives before your body feels safe holding it, and why so much “self-sabotage” is actually a capacity issue.

🪽  Creative entrepreneurship without force — choosing devotion over hustle, staying with your work for the long haul, and building slowly enough that your whole self can come with you.

🪽 Writing as medicine and method — how journaling, daily writing, and long-form expression become a practice of self-trust, marketing, and creative process all at once.

🪽  Finding your actual voice — shedding the styles, identities, and communities you once wrote to belong to, and returning to the way you naturally see and say things.

Links & Resources

→ You CANNOT MISS Emmie's YIN immersion!

→ Connect with Emmie Rae: The Daily Rest Studio + Japan retreats at her site.  

→ Follow Emmie on Instagram: @thedailyrest.

→ This is where we met, at her Onsen retreat. Could not recommend it more you guys.

→ Read Emmie’s long-form writing on Substack, where she writes essays and reflections through The Salon / The Deep Rest Salon.  

→ If this episode moved something in you, share it with a friend and tag us so we can see what landed!