Do you take time to rest? Time to engage in the intentional and purposeful act of laying it all down for a moment, before your “to-do” list is done. Or, like so many of us, do you have the thought that you only deserve rest after all the work is done? Or, maybe because your nervous system might be caught up in a perpetual amped up state, a cycle of stress, that when you try to rest, you just can’t, because you’re bullied by thoughts of what you “should ” be doing? Or, when you finally allow yourself to lie on the couch, you fill yourself up with external resources, television, social media, bad food, or alcohol, which, in extremes, isn’t rest at all, but more of a numbing. We turn to these external resources for “rest” because we can’t trust our own inner resources and our own inner knowledge. We are terrified of what we might feel in the blank space of rest.
It’s hard in our culture to give ourselves permission to rest. This very blog post about rest was intended for last month, and I tried to write it. I really did. I worked for weeks trying to get it right, wrote and rewrote, but couldn’t get it quite where I wanted it. Turns out the best thing I could do for it was rest. This was not without struggle. My inner critic proceeded to call me lazy and unproductive, she yelled at me to work harder and longer to make it happen. But I’ve been practicing working with my inner critic, so I kindly gave her permission to go take a nap. A common refrain in our coach training was that we have to “live it to give it”, so I had to rest and struggle with resting. Taking intentional rest is ridiculously hard, but it is a necessary, even subversive act in our lives to do so, as Tricia Hersey points out in her manifesto book, Rest is Resistance. I also think of coaching as a subversive act, because with coaching, we are learning how to listen and be guided by our essential self, not our cultural, ego-driven self. Coaching helps us disrupt our old operating systems. Rest is the practice that supports us through the process.
So what does it mean to rest? The formal definition is, “to cease work or movement in order to relax, refresh yourself, or recover strength. I love the last part of this definition, recover strength. Because I can honestly say that after an hour of a favorite show, I do feel refreshed, but if I watch for hours and hours, I can say for certain I have just numbed out and do not feel refreshed or recentered. I feel terrible. Resting, however, does not always mean to nap or lie down, although there definitely is a time and place for that.
Ultimately, resting is giving yourself the gift of your own attention in a moment of stillness.
Simple but not easy, right?
So in this moment, can you pause and turn your attention to your feet and feel them on the floor. Can you sense any air moving across any exposed part of your body, or feel your skin brushing up against your clothes? Can you rest into your body and sink down into yourself, just for a few seconds. Feel heavy and solid here, right now. Listen to your breath move in and out of your body.
Be here now. Connect to yourself.
Allow yourself to rest.
Soul Geography 