Somewhere I first heard, then read, that in most nature-based tribal cultures, adults average between 3 and 4 hours a day doing what we might call "work:" tending to the provision of food, clothing and shelter. The other hours of their days are passed in individual or communal creativity, sharing and play: storytelling, song, dance, ritual, art, and rest-the sacred art of just being!
I've spent the past more than 32 years of my life unlearning my “advanced” culture's values. Gradually finding my way to a lifestyle that truly honors my own wholeness as a being. With a deep commitment to listening inward to my body and my being, and a dedication to making choices that nourish the needs that I uncover, I am being led to craft a life that is very similar to this ancient, enduring model that I hadn't even known about till now.
My being and soul felt starved, my body exhausted from the adrenaline of unending stress and busyness. Getting sick hadn't even been a way to interrupt the pace-I'd always kept going, sick or not.
Still, a growing, persistent feeling that some part of me would never get born, might actually die if I didn't make a quiet place in which it could germinate, helped me to persevere, to find my way into the sacredness of rest. The increasingly urgent hunger for the nourishment, the solace of stillness gradually grew strong enough to begin to move me out of the crazy-making, squirrel-in-a-cage doing, doing, doing.
Slowly, I carved out open empty time in which to be free to drift in whatever directions inner urgings and Spirit might move me. Free to doze, nap, daydream, watch the sky, wander aimlessly in the natural world and other spaces of beauty. Free to putter about my inner and outer worlds without requirement to "accomplish" anything. Free from all external demands and input so that I might digest and assimilate my experiences, leisurely. This nourishment and solace that I made space for is what all of our beings, souls and bodies so need.
When we open to including and valuing rest, we are making sacred space for magic, wonder, Spirit and release to enter, to inform our lives. What enters and informs our lives moves through our lives to enter and inform the world.
It takes great courage to choose for rest. To consciously carve out non-doing times in the midst of the constant liminal and sub-liminal pressures around and within us to stay "productive." To stay immersed in the more conventional and, till now, more acceptable busyness of our peers.
And, it takes great trust to choose for the sacred space of resting: trust that tolerating and resisting the pressures to return to busyness and business-as-usual will lead to the gradual lessening of those pressures. Trust that any initial uneasiness we might feel in the open, drifting time will, with practice, give way to a growing and profound sense of the voluptuousness of just being!
To inspire your sacred practice of resting: look for SARK's Change Your Life Without Getting Out of Bed, the ultimate nap book! Reverberate with this Spanish proverb: “How beautiful it is to do nothing and then, afterward, to rest.”
Gather a few friends to help you create a "rest ethic," try doing "heads down, eyes closed" at your desk for five minutes every hour to begin "stopping-the-world."
Remember to be really gentle with yourself as you practice.
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.
If you'd like a deck of your very own to support you in your journey, click here to download Order Form.
Please feel free to e-mail me at rposin@hotmail.com. to share your reflections and responses to any or all of what you find here . I'd really like to hear what touches and nourishes you!
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