I had a different newsletter planned for today, but this phrase kept coming up, “My yoke is easy, my burden is light.” I heard it in passing when I wasn’t really listening, but it kind of stopped me in my tracks.
The first time I heard it was in a Youtube video I had playing in the background on my morning walk, and it quickly washed over me the way things do when you aren’t quite ready to receive them but you know they’re important. So I kind of brushed past it, but made a mental note to go deeper into it at a later time.
Then I heard it again. This time different context, different week, different person. By the third time, I stopped pretending it was a coincidence and looked it up…because what are the odds, right…and what exactly is a yoke, which I come to learn about later.
When I plugged those words into the Al Gore’s Google, this is what came up.
“Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy and my burden is light.” — Matthew 11:28–30
I read it and then I read it again. And even though I still didn’t quite understand it fully at the time, something in me that had been feeling tight just…let go a little.
I talk about beliefs, patterns, and identity in this space all the time. What we carry. What we keep choosing. What we’ve decided, usually a long time ago, was just the cost of being us. But this week I want to go somewhere a little different, somewhere that sits at the intersection of faith and the inner work.
Somewhere along the way, we started believing that the weight was the point, that navigating the hardships of life is the reward you get simply for breathing. But I want to challenge that.
And writing this for me is going to be tricky, because I am a card carrying Christian, Jesus is my homeboy, we’re down like 2 flat tires…but I also believe there is a throughline in all spirituality, regardless of religion, that I try to find it when sharing thoughts and ideas.
So if it seems like I’m doing mental gymnastics in a few places, it’s not avoid or diminish my Christian faith, but to be inclusive in spite of it.
Ok. Let’s get into it.
You Were Not Built to Carry This Alone
Ladies and gents, I feel like I could just pack things up and go home from this subtitle alone…but because I know you need some additional depth, stay with me.
A yoke, in its original context, was a wooden frame used to connect two oxen so they could share the work of pulling a load. When a younger, less experienced ox was paired with a stronger one, the stronger animal carried more of the weight. The movement of the stronger guided the weaker. So the burden got easier, because the load was shared.
…and this is the exact opposite of how most of us are living today.
We are out here pulling alone, and breaking our back, and for what…the privilege of saying we did it all by ourself. And you can’t say it’s because no one offered to help. You simply decided (on our own mind you), probably years ago, that needing help was a sign of weakness.
And overtime independence became the goal. And being the one who handles things and figures it out, who never lets the seams show, was what made us worthy of the life we’re trying to build.
And so we picked up the yoke, strapped ourselves in, and started pulling. And we kept pulling, through the seasons that were hard and as well as the ones that looked fine from the outside, and through the losses that nearly broke us and the wins that felt emptier than they were supposed to.
The premise behind this idea is not passive. It is relational. It’s come to me; take my yoke, meaning get under it together, share the weight, stop trying to run this thing on your own strength alone.
And it’s addressed specifically to people who are weary and burdened. Not to the ones who have it together or the ones who’ve “earned” it. But instead to the ones who are tired.
Which, if we’re being honest, is most of us right now, especially right now.
The Yoke You’re Wearing Might Not Be His
Now here’s the part that got me. If His yoke is easy and His burden is light, then what exactly is it that so many of us have been hauling around and calling our cross to bear?
Because we love to say it don’t we; like it’s some badge of honor.
When the truth is, it doesn’t feel like one. It feels crushing. And it shows up in our lives as exhaustion. The kind of exhaustion that we can’t seem to get rid of no matter how hard we try. Or it becomes a to-do list that never gets shorter. Or worse still, a responsibility that has somehow expanded to fill every corner of your life until there was no room left for you in it.
So either the scripture is wrong, which I don’t believe, or some of what we’re carrying was never actually given to us by God.
Now here come the mental gymnastics I warned you about, take the scripture and God out of it completely (my mom is going to be so disappointed I said that)…and just focus on life force energy.
We feel more in our bodies when we’re helping others, connecting with others, having shared experiences with one another in our darkest hours. We are supposed to lean on one other for guidance and understanding.
…but here’s where human connection muddies the water.
We are sometimes more committed to our connections than we are to ourselves…to our truth, to our wants, desires and needs. So much so that we ignore the internal signals telling us to stop, put that down, because it’s not yours.
In fact, some of what you’re carrying came from other places entirely:
The version of success your family decided on before you were old enough to have an opinion.
The pressure to maintain a life that looks right, even when it doesn’t feel right.
The belief, often unspoken and deeply wired, that your worth is tied to your output, your usefulness, your ability to keep producing.
Guilt about rest. Guilt about wanting more. Guilt about wanting less. Guilt about not being grateful enough for what you already have.
Other people’s fear that you absorbed and passed down to yourself as responsibility.
We took on yokes that were never designed for us, from systems and families and cultures that needed us to keep pulling. And we called it purpose. We called it strength. We called it faith.
Chiiiiiile. Put. It. Down.
Purpose doesn’t grind you down into someone you don’t recognize. Strength doesn’t require you to disappear to prove itself. And faith, was never meant to be a performance of endurance. It was always meant to be a relationship where the weight gets shared.
The question worth asking isn’t just how do I get some rest. It’s: whose yoke am I actually wearing right now?
Rest Is Not a Reward
Rest is not something you get when you’ve done enough. It’s not the thing waiting for you on the other side of the project, the launch, the hard season, the next milestone. It’s not the vacation you’ll take when things slow down. And it is not the prize at the end of the proving.
It often comes before the resolution. It comes in the middle of the weary. Come to me, not come to me when you’ve figured it out, not come to me when you’ve finally earned it. Right now. As you are. With all of it still unresolved…in your messiest of seasons, come.
That is a radically different structure than the one most of us are used to operating in.
We have structured our lives, our spirituality included, around the idea that rest is earned. That God helps those who help themselves. That you rest when the work is done.
But my good people, I’m here to tell you, the work is never done. And so rest keeps getting deferred, and we keep carrying more, and somewhere along the way we stop being able to tell the difference between calling and compulsion.
And here’s where the second half of that verse finally lands: my burden is light.
He did not say my burden is absent. He said it is light.
There is still a load. Life doesn’t disappear when you surrender the wrong yoke. Your responsibilities are still real, the hard things are still hard, and the work still exists. But the quality of the weight changes when you’re actually carrying what you were made to carry, and not dragging along everything else you picked up out of fear, obligation, or the deeply rooted belief that your worth depended on it.
Lightness isn't the absence of weight. It's what happens when the weight finally fits. When you're not fighting the load, not white-knuckling your way through it, not performing your ability to handle it. You're just moving, guided and held.
And the truth is, most of us have probably never felt that.
Sure, we’ve felt relief, which is what happens when the pressure temporarily drops. But relief and lightness are different things. Relief is a break in the heaviness. Lightness is a different relationship with it altogether.
And real rest, the kind that actually restores something in you, is not a pause between productive stretches. It’s an act of trust. It’s saying: I believe that the world won’t fall apart if I put this down. I believe I am held by something bigger than my own effort. I believe I was made for more than my output.
That kind of rest is a spiritual practice. And it takes just as much intention as any other practice you've built your life around. Maybe even more.
Because it requires you to believe, and I mean really believe, that the burden was never supposed to feel like this.
Your Reset This Week
Identify one thing you are carrying that you did not consciously choose to pick up.
Examples: Financial responsibilities for others, the emotional weight of keeping everyone around you okay, the version of yourself you decided you had to be after something hard happened.
And then ask yourself: Is this actually mine to carry? Or did I just never put it down?
Closing
The yoke being easy doesn’t mean the life will be. It just means you were never supposed to pull it alone.
Whatever you’re carrying right now, the grief, the grind, the pressure to keep it all looking fine (and yes, that rhymed), there is an invitation standing open.
It is not complicated. And it does not require you to have it all together first. It only asks of you one thing. Just: come.
Find your people. Find your practice. And lean into them.
And then, if you can, never stop.
See you next week.
—Donteacia 💛
P.S. And you’re someone who likes video, head on over to my Youtube channel and subscribe. We have a series on reinventing your life after 40, 50 and beyond that starts tomorrow.
