Respect Rest # 56

Respect Rest  # 56                                                                        September 03, 2018
Today is Labor Day in the USA.  The day when we collectively rest our working selves and honor the many roles we take in life.  It’s got me thinking about resting.  I mean truly deeply resting.   It is so sweet and yet so hard for us humans to truly rest unless of course we are unconscious, as in sleep, or compelled as in a designated day off, or illness or some other forced circumstance.  Not surprising as we live in a society that prizes doing.

Deep rest is really a dynamic alive circumstance yet I tend to treat it solely as an obligatory reset button necessary to fuel my “real life” instead of the sweet companion it is.  I am a mover, a dancer, an engager and I love to feel my heart pumping, my blood surging, my brain firing!  I live to collaborate with everyone I come into contact with.  The gifts of relationship are just too wonderful to sit alone by myself.

And yes we understand that rest is necessary for the support of all that firing, after all the human body-mind is designed to create.  But it’s time I give rest its rightful R-E-S-P-E-C-T.
Rest isn’t checking out; in fact it’s really checking in.  Attuning, aligning with what we need to be our best and there are many many ways to do so.  While sitting down and reading a good book by the ocean or watching an entertaining movie or speaking with a dear friend offers rest from our moving, working life or life as we most ordinarily think of it, and offers amazing necessary benefits, it is not the active rest I am examining.  Nor is day dreaming, as lovely as it can be to let the mind wander, rest in the deepest sense because well, the mind is still active.

When I stop and sit with myself, by myself I find that my brain doesn’t seem to get the message.  She, the me of my intellect, simply will not quiet as there is too much calling to it. And besides, it feels like a waste of precious time while I am awake.

There are untold benefits in reposing deeply within.  I want to rest with myself, by myself and remain aware of the collaboration while not engaging.  In other words, I long to rest and be aware that that is what I am doing; not do something that is called rest because it is not what I usually do; or numbing myself to whatever reality is presenting and in that, not so much rest, as check out. 

Rest as a pure experience is the most refreshing, rejuvenating practice there is.  It supports and nourishes absolutely everything else we do in life. And it takes, in a word, just that, practice.  We feel what a good night’s sleep does for our mental, physical and emotional capacity.  Hopefully we give it the respect it deserves.  Meditation does this on a deeper, subtler level and it is powerful.

Of course to sit with self means to confront the messiness of our inner territory; the often agitated or conversely stupefied quality of the mind. That’s hard. That’s why there is something to learn, a method and knowledge to be had to support that practice.  Distancing ourselves from this necessary confrontation with distraction, even if it is a wanted one, only serves to postpone the inevitable and increase its power.  Ignoring it will do nothing to assist in its change.  And, ultimately that’s what we are after isn’t it?  True deep lasting change. A change that can never be enacted solely from the surface. We must go deep and in that depth rest.  

In dynamic rest we increase the body’s natural power to heal.  In doing so daily we choose to intelligently collaborate with the power that animates, supports and sustains life.  We ride that increasing wave of power that rids the body-mind of agitation and stupor thereby, spontaneously expanding the light of our own individual consciousness. The fullness of that light pours itself into the many roles we inhabit increasing our capacity to enact, to enjoy and to be steady.

We become efficacious and joyful, not hypnotized and held captive; we are steady, rooted in our light, not removed from reality.

“I will rest when I am dead” is the proud refrain of a doer, a mover, a shaker; a so called ‘disrupter’ of the old model.  Life is short there is no time to waste.  True that.  So let’s intelligently apply our time.  Let’s get clear on exactly what it is we want to do. Let’s apply the most potent power and juice to the effort.  Let’s get plugged in to the cosmic generator as it were!   

Rest your social persona(s) deeply in the silent source of your creative force then emerge firing on ALL cylinders. Powerfully hit your target each and every time.  I am realizing, I who love collaboration, that the most important collaborator I have is right under my nose resting in my own heart.   I’m taking advantage of resting in her embrace today and every day so that I can do more, be more fully alive.

Live fully.  Respect rest, meditate.