Respect your need to rest

Rest seems to have developed a bit of a negative connotation lately. There’s a growing mentality that if we’re not getting shit done, we’re not being productive, aren’t worthwhile or are somehow a failure. A panic sometimes ensues when we do stop to take some time out, and we often end up feeling guilty and anxious. The trouble is, all this doing doing doing is leaving us frazzled, exhausted and, ironically, unproductive. We can become resentful and unfulfilled in these moments, not because we’re not doing great things, but because we’re actually too knackered to enjoy doing them. Without our even knowing it, life can become a process of box ticking, of doing one thing after another without pause in between, without a moment to rest, replenish and revitalise before the next thing. It’s the epidemic of ‘busy’ in a world that won’t stop, so best we don’t lest we are to keep up.

I’m a meditation teacher, so essentially my whole job is to encourage people to stop and then give them something to “do” (i.e. meditate) when they’ve done that first bit. Daily meditation is an excellent start because it gives our tired minds and bodies an opportunity to experience deep rest. With deep rest comes deep healing, replenishment and restoration. When we’re resting, our bodies can kick out of the adrenaline-charged energy of our “doing” mode and can move into states of purifying stress, tension and fatigue. But I’m going to say that even twenty minutes of meditation twice a day isn’t enough. That our lives are so intensely demanding of us on all levels of our being that we need more. We need the early nights we deny ourselves in favour of one more email (the irony of that being the truth for me right now as I type this – hey, we preach what we most need to practice!!), we need the quiet afternoons with a book, we need the playing in the garden with our kids or pets. We need rest. Plain and simple. And we need to start treating it as an equally important job to be done as everything else on the list. Even non-action is a form of action. And for so many of us, particularly at this time of year, rest is the greatest form of action we can take towards our own healing and health.

As you go into this new week, I encourage you to look at the space you can make for more rest. Doesn’t have to be an entire day, it doesn’t even need to be a whole afternoon. Start small – can you take half an hour to read alone or sit in the sun? Can you commit to just finishing three things on your endless to-do list instead of ten before you call it a day? Whatever it is, whatever is manageable, give your weary self a moment of quiet and let yourself rest.