I am beginning to realize that resting is one of the most difficult things we can grapple with
Rest implies feeling the need to rest
Resting implies feeling fatigue, and feeling fatigue is something quite far removed from our current power so polluted and buried but a sea of superstructures foreign to us.
To feel fatigue is to stop giving it a name and a surname; to give it a name and a surname is to give fatigue a reason to exist, and this keeps us clinging to something that is outside of us …work, family, relationships, heat, cold …mosquitoes
It’s like saying I’m tired because something or someone is interfering with my system-but if that happens you mean I’m out of my system-I’m living anyone else’s system and I can’t adapt to all that that entails …until I feel endless fatigue and I don’t know what to do with it
The “biggest” thing I seem to do, to allow myself, the one that really “turns me around,” is to decide to “disconnect” … then “yes, I take a break” , “I’m going on vacation … (just to vacate a bit from something I’ll have to go back to anyway”), go to the spa, laze on the couch with a good book etc…
So I’m tired of a system that’s not mine and I’m taking a break…typically without really even being where I decide to take a break
classic example? “ah, I treated myself to a day at the spa and a nice massage” – have you ever found that aside from the first few minutes of “ah that’s wonderful!” the rest of the day went wandering off into various thoughts and not even the touch of the most knowledgeable masseur really brought you back inside your body?
To rest, really rest “you have to be there,” you have to be all there, body mind soul….all you have to rest, all you have to find peace within yourself-this is resting
We eat, drink, walk around, look for organic food, eat at the restaurants we like best, drink good wine, try to go on relaxing trips … but all of this happens mostly outside of us
No food, no wine, no travel can really give us Pleasure (with a capital P) if we are not present to ourselves as we perform these actions
Resting does not mean procuring other actions that undo the nefarious effect of all daily actions acted in the absence of presence, taste, and pleasure.
Rest is not “nail-biting”
Resting is not “escaping,” resting is not “lying on a bed” ….often we confuse resting with “taking time” from something or someone …well friends, this is not resting … it is procrastinating a state of alertness and it is something that is “never enough” …a day of detachment/escape from everything is not enough
because it is like contrasting “defined fatigue with last name duration” with “defined rest with last name and duration” …. how much narrowness in all this! don’t you find!
In a life vast enough to say how much, in a world where anything is possible we narrow everything down to a few defined elements … and often badly too!
Fatigue the one that doesn’t go away even after the spa day…is that fatigue that really has nothing to do with contingency…is the fatigue with which we identify , we are fatigue, we are effort, we are work, we are commitment, we are results (expected, achieved, pursued) …. and if we are that stuff there … what can a day spa do?
I became aware of all this by having had beside me for a long time a person who of will, effort, commitment, toil never wanted to hear about it – a person so in touch with his own needs as a human being that at all times he dosed his energies to the best of his ability to meet them
There have been many moments when I have felt resentment, criticism, inability to endure such out-of-the-box behavior – I was taught that “those who do nothing” are fanatics, depressed, or otherwise someone who has problems
But feeling that you want to strive for self-realization has nothing to do with the amount of things you do or the dissipation of energy
Have you ever felt very thirsty but didn’t realize it …until someone in front of you drinks a big glass of water and invites you to do the same
“no thanks, I’m not thirsty” …. “all right come on, one sip” …and when your lips finally touch the water molecules a world inside you lights up and says “YES! it was just the water I wanted! I needed it desperately and didn’t realize it!”
here, the same goes for resting
Only when you begin to feel deeply, without names and surnames, the release of tension …. feeling how tension, fatigue inhabit every cell in your body …when you begin to relax even the fingers of one hand the process of letting go of what is not yours begins and, if you do not interfere it continues, until you look at those next to you who know this as a natural state and feel only a big “thank you” !
Thank you I didn’t think I was so thirsty for rest! I didn’t think I had strayed so far from me as to re-enter the “doing,” the “judging,” in a word, “the drudgery” of not being me
I now inhabit my body again
Now I feel again my heart, my feelings, my potential, my inspiration … life, love
I now inhabit myself again
Deeply grateful
