Rest
I was heartened to read Karen Brody’s recent blog post where she talks about rest and how many are using it as a tool to be more productive, missing the point entirely.
I’ve been questioning this for a while now. Yoga Nidra has become a popular practice in the yoga world, and the concept of rest too, but I have concerns that it becomes yet another tick box exercise, “done my rest- tick”, yet another ‘thing’ to fit into already busy days.
I also like what Karen says when she writes, “If we are resting to be more productive then we are feeding into the same paradigm that's making us all sick and tired”, because I believe she touches on something that is underpinning so much of life right now, this constant feeding into the same paradigm that has the world sick and tired and in need of change.
Frequently I see people coming up with ideas and schemes, which they feel will positively change the way we live, yet from my side, all they are doing is simply reinventing the wheel and in many cases, losing themselves in the jargon of it. Women especially are doing this, believing they are supporting a move to a new more aligned way of being in touch with the deep feminine, yet actually they are still feeding into the male paradigm.
Patriarchy is so deeply ingrained in our psyche and in our society that it is very difficult to see through it. I was reading an article about Jane Fraser being appointed as the first female CEO of Citigroup, making her the first woman to lead a major US bank and I congratulate her for piercing the glass ceiling and yet I find myself questioning whether it will actually make a positive change. If she is playing the game the male way, focused on objectives and achievement and feeding into the linear, then what difference does it make if she is female, she’s still supporting the same system; nothing changes.
I’m not sure that we can create a new world based on sex anyhow, nor on what’s happened previously, because memory doesn’t always serve us well, its laden with perception, and false perception often too. I wonder if it might be the dreamers that will see us through to another way of being, those who have tapped into a much deeper place within themselves that is not based on history (at least in their minds), but imagines a whole new world that we have not yet ever seen. This is one of heart and creativity, not one of fear and safety.
This might be a world where family and health are viewed as more important than material wealth and the bottom line, where stress is taken seriously and so too the needs of our children for parental interaction and time. A world where simplicity is viewed as more important than filling our houses and our minds, our world then, with ‘stuff’ that adds no value beyond the sophomoric and numbing that is so entrenched in our society.
We are always trying to find a way to numb our pain. I could write a whole blog post on this alone. The almost daily reporting of court cases over here in Guernsey about people found illegally possessing cannabis and being found drunken in a public place is indicative of this, so too the drive towards legalisation of recreational drugs and the explosion of CBD oil as a pain reliever. I always think of Kahlil Gibran’s poem entitled ‘On Pain’, which reads:
“And a woman spoke, saying, Tell us of Pain.
And he said:
Your pain is the breaking of the shell that encloses your understanding.
Even as the stone of the fruit must break, that its heart may stand in the sun, so must you know pain.
And could you keep your heart in wonder at the daily miracles of your life your pain would not seem less wondrous than your joy;
And you would accept the seasons of your heart, even as you have always accepted the seasons that pass over your fields.
And you would watch with serenity through the winters of your grief.
Much of your pain is self-chosen.
It is the bitter potion by which the physician within you heals your sick self.
Therefore trust the physician, and drink his remedy in silence and tranquillity:
For his hand, though heavy and hard, is guided by the tender hand of the Unseen,
And the cup he brings, though it burn your lips, has been fashioned of the clay which the Potter has moistened with His own sacred tears. “
I like how he writes, “much of your pain is self-chosen”, because this is my experience. Having suffered with depression for much of my 20s, and having made an attempt to study and understand my mind and the source of my suffering, I see that so much of it was because of my mind and my perception of life as it was lived moment to moment, but so often lived based on memory, and even this a perception, an illusion all of itself.
It was my pain that made me go deeper, that asked me not to numb myself from it with antidepressants and to gradually let go of my reliance on smoking cannabis and drinking alcohol, but to delve right deep into it, to understand it, and to make peace with it. In the process of this, turning as I did to yoga and Reiki, I connected to a part of myself that I knew on some level from my teenage years as a surfer and a contented childhood spent so often in my imagination, that there is more than what we can see. As Gibran writes, there is this part of us that is “guided by the tender hand of the Unseen”. It was the connection to the tender hand (the hand an extension of the heart space lets not forget) of the Unseen that eased my pain and supported my healing.
It is this perhaps, the Unseen, that will help to change things if only we can trust in it. It is tricky though, to trust in something that we cannot see, to trust in something that is difficult to define because definition limits and this cannot be limited, to trust in something that is felt from a deep place inside us that comes and goes, cannot be held down. This is not a world where we trust. This is a world where we try to make life certain, ordered, controlled, because we don’t trust and look how Covid-19 has challenged that!
This is not about patriarchy or feminism or the divine feminine movement, this is something entirely different. This is about a paradigm shift deeper into the heart, that is not separated in the quest to understand and compartmentalize. It is about resting into that deeper place within ourselves, within our body, that cannot be intellectualised, that cannot limit us like our mind, but that can help us navigate our lives into the unknown. It can be very messy, but this is the way of the heart, as my yoga teacher says, “Deep grace isn’t always pretty or easy to witness. Sometimes it is necessary to howl.”
It seems so simple to me at times. If we look to those who might inspire us like Mother Teresa or Mahatma Gandhi, and for me Diana Beresford-Kroeger, there is only deep integrity, heart and simplicity. These are people who learned how to rest into themselves. I don’t know that this meant they took time to lie down and be still, which is how we might think that ‘rest’ looks, although it is likely. If you look at a definition of rest, ‘cease work or movement in order to relax, sleep, or recover strength’, then being still must surely play a part in it. Yet it is more than resting for the sake of getting anything and more an opportunity to ‘strengthen’ through non-doing, the connection to that which is always present and yet often overlooked in the quest for productivity.
As Brody writes, “Productivity is not bad. But the problem with using rest practices to fuel more productivity is that not only can productivity put us in a hypnotic state of masculine overdrive, but productivity feeds a culture that is fundamentally not working for most of our bodies and minds. When we tell people to rest so that they can be more productive, even if it's couched in values asking us to slow down, we are still selling a flawed paradigm.” She gets it! This is the trouble with our society. We grasp onto something as if it might be the magic pill that makes everything OK, yet still, still, we do it to get something; we expect an outcome, and a positive one at that.
It’s so not that. In the fleeting moments of the rest there is nothing to do and nothing to change, for we become, fleeting, fleeting, fleeting, like a bird fleetingly visiting a bird table to feed, more of who we already are, underneath all the stories and labels and ‘things’ and ‘stuff’. It is not that we trust the Unseen, it is that we are the Unseen, so why wouldn’t we trust in it when we know it to be all that is actually real. Fleetingly it goes. But like the bird that fleetingly feeds at the bird table, we fill ourselves up on it each time that visit it. It is this for me, that is truly rest. It doesn’t try to change anything! It allows us to live from a deeper place in heart, that’s all. Then everything changes!
It is not therefore for us to find a new way on the outside, but to rest more fully into the deep presence always available to us from within our own body, on the inside. This is when rest becomes much more than the opportunity to become more productive or to achieve something or produce an outcome, to separate, divide and conquer, but to take us back home to the mystery and magic of the self.
I’ll leave you with this poem from Rainer Rilke
“My life is not this steeply sloping hour,
in which you see me hurrying.
Much stands behind me; I stand before it like a tree;
I am only one of my many mouths,
and at that, the one that will be still the soonest.
I am the rest between two notes,
which are somehow always in discord
because Death’s note wants to climb over—
but in the dark interval, reconciled,
they stay there trembling.
And the song goes on, beautiful.”
P.S. Pride was AMAZING tonight!
