Sprouting Microgreens

To my fellow entrepreneurs: your body is not a machine, let's break this karmic pattern and practice the art of growing systems that nourish us.

Hi! I’m Jerrelle, the writer behind The Dinner Ritual, a space where you’re invited to reconnect with your highest Self. I’m here to help you take back your time, your sovereignty, your body and mind—especially if any of these parts felt lost or siphoned during the day. Through the act (and art) of cooking, we transform ordinary moments into sacred pauses, opportunities to ground into the body, tend to our mental health, and return to our innate, God-given sense of joy. Subscribe to join the mission and others like you and receive recipes, meditations, and self-healing rituals that will help you reclaim your passion for life and your well-being, one evening at a time.

This week, under a pileup of responsibilities, I slipped back into an old, deeply ingrained pattern: pushing past exhaustion. A familiar voice crept in with a devilish purr: “Just keep soldiering through it.”

I found myself in bed late at night with my laptop open, audibly crying out from physical discomfort. My back ached. My eyes burned. My brain felt like goo. My body was done. Yet, I kept going. I couldn’t even close the laptop. I couldn’t stop—until my husband, quietly watching me spiral, stepped over and gently shut the lid.

Just like that: no more glowing blue light. No more to-do's or designs or emails. No more punishing thoughts about how my body wasn’t working fast enough. Everything just paused. And for the first time in hours, I was free. And just as instantly, the aching stopped.

The stark contrast between painful pushing and complete surrender made me wonder why I struggled to close the laptop myself. Once I snapped out of my working spell, all I wanted to do was to be present with my body, to soothe it from those hours of unconscious neglect. But just moments before, stopping had felt absurd—impossible. Why did someone else have to step in to interrupt this pattern and remind me my world wouldn’t collapse if I just…took a break?

This wasn’t an innocent conversation about will power and completed to-do lists. This was a painful pattern of survival, dressed as ambition, rearing its head again. This was self-abandonment disguised as responsibility.

I’ve worn this rhythm before. It once felt comfortable, normal, noble, even. But just because it was familiar didn’t make it right. Just because I’ve trained myself to tune out my body’s cries for help to continue producing to the edge of burnout, doesn’t mean I’m better for it, and it’s certainly not the way I ever want to live again. Turning my body into a machine— making it produce at rhythms created by toxic systems that have instilled unreasonable standards and fears of unworthiness, isn’t noble. Accomplishing everything at the cost of myself isn’t a win.

Next time, I want to be the one who steps in. To close the laptop. To say, no. To listen and care for my body before it has to scream for me to listen. I’m ready to call out when fear is wearing the mask of virtuosity, because I’m so done confusing the two.