The Power of Rest

Is what you are doing truly rest, or can it be leveled up?

Rest…Here is another concept that we can assess across the spectrum of animal, land and human wellbeing. It is an important part of natural cycles. It heals, it resets, and it leads to abundance.

We look back at older farming practices, before every ounce of productivity was being wrung out of our now ever declining soils. Our ancestors fallowed, or rested fields as part of an important rotational system. They recognized that pastures needed time to just be pastures.  Even though they possibly did not understand the intricacies that we now know scientifically about them, soils were given time to recover. Different plants were then planted in rotation to allow for a diversity of organisms fed by these varying plants, along with breaking disease cycles.

If we are sensible, we rest our performance horses, jumpers are not jumped every day, barrel horses do not run intense patterns day in and day out, and the people that push these limits will realize severe consequences manifesting as lameness’s, diminished performance amongst other health issues in their animals.

What is it in us that wants to take everything we can from a system including from our own? In our so called society, we are trained from birth to perform, to compete and are valued in winning at all cost. Is this sustainable in the long run? Just like the examples of land and performance horses stated above, if we keep taking and taking, the results will be dire. The returns will be ever diminishing as we exhaust these natural systems. The land will only grow weeds if heavy amounts of expensive inputs are not continuously applied and after costly veterinary costs, body workers bills and supplements, the sporting horse will eventually be relegated to pasture or worse as it is continuously being replaced by the hope of another’s performance.

Hate to break it you folks, but this is how we treat ourselves as well. Even when we “rest” we are not resting and recovering. Our rest tends to not be pure as we are chronically distracted by our devices, and our minds are occupied with the things that we ”should be doing” or maybe where we could have done better, as we seemingly have fallen short of some arbitrary and unattainable idea of perfection. If you pay attention to your thoughts, they are just examples of where your brain is going during rest; things such as guilt and shortcomings. How can this be a state from which to recover and create from?

I too have suffered from, and have deeply contemplated this illusion of rest and had come to the point where I ran a personal experiment.  I purposely rested. I completely rested. I turned off social media, stayed away from news and sat and rested without guilt, without needing to perform, without distractions. It was difficult at first, as I had been off work for a bit and felt that I had been just sitting around doing nothing anyways. Was that not rest? Why did I feel compelled to rest more? I berated myself for not performing, not producing, wasting time, etc, etc,  Societies voice of expectations continuously running in the background. Even though I thought I was resting, I was in actual fact not. I was spinning in guilty thoughts of underachieving inadequacy. My body was not healing, my energy was low and I was not happy and rested. I was actually lethargic and miserable.

Purposefully resting and shutting off, resulted in unexpected, although upon reflection perfectly reasonable consequences. As I caredully monitored and caught my thoughts about expectations and just rested completely without distraction, my mind became uncluttered, energy returned like never before as I called it back from everywhere else, back to myself. I was no longer spending precious energy on what I should be, or what I should not be doing. My inner being begun to talk to me about what it was that I really wanted, not what it was that was expected from me. It was life changing.

Just like when we look at the often overlooked benefits of rest in natural systems, the fallowing of land, the resting of humans and animal athletes alike, we need to embrace purposeful and complete rest of our own selves. We are in fact human beings not human doings, and need to find balance in this. By practicing purposeful rest, we can pause and reset our direction, call back our scattered and often frivolously donated energy and use it for our own mental and physical healing. Just like land and animals, we are not machines that are valued only on output. When we have reset and truly rested, we can then mindfully hand out the extra energy that we now have gathered back to ourselves and distribute it in measured quantities to things that align with our values and desires with real awareness. Weather you can take an hour out somewhere, day out, a week, or whatever you can afford, and sit in this meditative and rejuvenating practice with yourself and truly rest mentally and physically, I guarantee you will realize profound personal results.  I encourage you to look to nature and reclaim true rest as it was intended incorporate it as a regular part of your life.