In my mid-twenties, I rarely slept more than four or five hours a night. I was constantly busy: By day I was running subjects for my dissertation research project at graduate school. At night I was working part-time as a waitress in an all-night cafe. As part of my psychotherapy practicum, I was seeing two clients each week at the low-cost university clinic. Each week I would have an hour of supervision about my work with these clients and then meet with my peers in a two and a half-hour psychotherapy practicum. I was seeing my own therapist twice a week. And, aside from all that, I was seriously involved in two romantic relationships (one with a man and one with a woman).
When I had finished the research and writing for my dissertation, I began working as a half-time clinical intern/half-time research associate.
Throughout the year-long internship I continued with the clinic clients, the therapy practicum and the supervision hour at the university. I did, though, end my therapy and one of the two romantic relationships. Then I began sort-of-living-with the man I'd been seeing. That involved more commuting: dragging my clothes and paperwork back and forth across Manhattan in a large carpetbag as we spent part of the time at my place, part of the time at his and part of the time separately.
In place of sleep and rest, I drank an outrageous number of cups of coffee, smoked at least two packs of cigarettes a day and dieted rigorously, regularly taking an appetite suppressor without consciously understanding that it was an upper. (Just how much of an upper only became clear when a friend-who'd taken one to stay up one night to finish a paper-found herself unable to get to sleep for three whole days.)
In my late twenties, I chose to move upstate to Buffalo, New York where the man with whom I had been sort-of-living had relocated for a research position. I took a full-time job as a counseling psychologist at the State University there. And, at the same time, I continued to complete my work with the practicum clients in New York City. This involved commuting to the City by plane for part of every week over the course of my first three months in Buffalo.
A few months after that commute ended, it became clear that neither Buffalo nor the full-time living-with part of the relationship was working out. I moved into my own apartment in Buffalo and began the process of rebuilding professional connections in New York City. This involved me once in yet another three-month-long air-commute to the City. Hired on as a visiting professor, I was teaching two projective psychological testing courses on Friday evenings and all day Saturdays at the New School for Social Research.
During both of these air-commuter periods, I worked four long-hour days at the University counseling center each week. Fridays I traveled to the City to teach (or see clients) and to visit with my closest women friends. Saturdays, after my late afternoon class (or client) I'd catch a ride to the airport and return to Buffalo. Sundays were spent preparing food and clothes for the week to come and spending relationship time with one or the other of the now two people with whom I was then involved. I never came up for air. Rest was not in my vocabulary.
I continued to live many variations of this break-neck pace until my 31st year. That year, something broke open inside me. Something hit me upside the head letting me know that I couldn't go on like this and survive. Severe back pains, vivid premonitions that I would die if I didn't get to some place green, and a startling insight about the underpinnings of my nonstop busyness all moved me to a major shift in my living style.
The insight came in one of those unbidden lightening-bolt moments of realization. In that flash, I saw that most of my never-ending doings were my frantic attempts to find some basis upon which I could finally feel worthwhile. The doings were intended to make me feel significant, valuable, okay-about-myself. Being highly productive in conventional terms and achieving superwoman feats of accomplishment had been my misguided path to dismantling a desperate sense of my own unworthiness and unloveableness. In that moment of illumination, I understood that, if I couldn't feel okay or worthwhile just for being, no amount of doing was ever going to create that feeling in me.
From that moment, I began the practice of committing to doing less instead of more every time I felt beset by my old, familiar sense of not being enough. And, I began searching for ways to dismantle my overwhelmingly busy lifestyle. I collapsed my workweek to three longer days instead of five shorter ones. I rented a beach house for the winter and spent four days a week hanging out there with the man to whom I was now married. I stopped all the running around that I had been doing in the City. Instead, and at the beach, I rested: lounged, napped, read and took long bicycle rides around cranberry bogs. This shift slowed me down enough to begin to feel and to understand what was going on within me.
I thought about moving to this beach community and starting a psychotherapy practice there. My partner and I even looked at houses and consulted with a builder whose work we liked. Fortunately, I came to see that, unless I found a way to address the deeper issues, I would soon recreate a similarly too-busy life out in this small village. The more I listened inward, the clearer it became that my only hope for the changes I was needing (to help me to learn to value myself just for being) required a more radical walking away from all of my life as it was then. I needed to put down all the roles and structures in which I had been living my life. I felt pushed from deep within me to find space, empty time and a place in which to begin to nurture whatever it was inside of me that needed to be born. In a series of gradually accelerating steps, I was able to do this putting down, this carving out of time and space for the germinating of a new way of being in myself. (See Pirouettes, for more of this story.)
Resting in the middle of my overachieving life had opened a door for me. Over these next 35+ years, I've committed myself diligently and persistently to reclaiming the significance, honorability, meaningfulness and productivity of rest as a purposeful act. I've also worked as diligently and persistently to learn to value, honor and love myself just for being. The two paths, not surprisingly, have been intimately interwoven.
Resting: unplugging, being unreachable for periods of time opens the space for an inner life to blossom. The more in touch we become with our inner life, the more able we become to live from the inside out. We can get to know who we truly are, to feel our own worthiness and uniqueness. We can become more grounded and centered. We can become more able to act from a place of balance, solidness and self-awareness.
Yet, everything in our modern world conspires to keep us from addressing this urgent need within us. Multi-tasking, overstuffed Filo-faxes and overbooked calendars have become the gold standard: the generally accepted measure of a person's worth, significance, importance or their credentials as a good parent. Laptop computers, cell phones, portable Fax's, evermore multifunctional iterations of palm-pilots, beepers and pagers seduce us into believing that never being unplugged or unreachable is a wonderful rather than a crippling thing.
All the high-tech, electronic, digital, state-of-the-art, labor-saving gadgets and gismos have helped us to turn ourselves into a world of hyper-stressed beings (both adult and children) who perpetually feel we haven't time or room enough for all we have to do to survive. What's worse, none of us ever actually sees the time we're supposedly are saving with all these devices. That time just gets filled up with more busyness and doing.
And, what once might conceivably have been leisure time has been co-opted as well. High-tech, expensive-equipment-intensive and extreme sports have replaced true leisure with activities that are evaluated in terms of output/productivity/challenges met and conquered. We measure miles run, biked, paddled, swum; heights/degree of difficulty of slopes skied, cliffs scaled, mountains biked, rivers rafted, etc.
The more we keep doing, the further we seem to get from, and from valuing, our true selves. The further we get from our true selves the more daunting it is to contemplate slowing down, resting and just being with ourselves. Yet, rest is as (or perhaps even more) urgent, significant, honorable, meaningful and productive as any other purposeful act. It is in the open, quiet just-being time that we begin to find and to reflect on what is truly so for us. And, it is this getting to know what is so in and for us is that provides us with the ground of being from which a healing, creative and healthy life flows. (See Rest is Sacred for more about this.)
Be really tender with and attentive to your over-achieving, rest-needing self.
P.S. So many of your delicious e-mails send appreciations for the affirmation, support and nourishment you receive from the site. When I answer them, I don’t always remember to let you know that having your own deck of the Rememberings and Celebrations cards is a way to bring this same loving voice into your everyday world, to have it at hand as you need to remind yourself of the "real" truth moment to moment in the crazimakingness of the so-called real world!
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The card on this page is part of a set of 64 handcolored bookmark-size cards called the Rememberings and Celebrations deck. They can be used as an oracle, a meditation focus or a "book-in-pieces" to kindle and grow a compassionate, gentle, unconditionally loving, fiercely protective inner-Mother to help you carve safe healing space for your emerging self and for the wounded little ones inside.
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