What happens when you feel like you need to stop… slow down… be?

You may notice your mind racing.  You are constantly planning what you need to get done, when to do it, how to do it quicker,  more efficiently. You see yourself planning, predicting, analysing all your experiences. You are caught in a need to either be doing activity or thinking about doing the activity.

Under this relentless doing you see your need to always be improving things, achieving and being productive. There is a desire to tick off your to-do list, to see things completed or know you have made something/someone better.  You see too that others have come to rely on your doing and you have come to see yourself as someone who gets things done. This doing has become who you are.

It is painful when you are suddenly confronted with your need to rest. When your body, mind and spirit tell you that you are exhausted and can do no more. Somewhere deep inside you your weariness lets you know you need time out to rest, heal, nourish, and replenish yourself.

Resting can be challenging because it gives us space to feel a little of the pain we have been avoiding by rushing around being busy. In slowing down, we may begin to feel the ache of loss or sense somehow that something deep is missing. We may tune into our inner conflicts and how they bring up fear, anger, and grief. It’s no surprise to realise how so much of the time we are distracting ourselves from feeling how disconnected we can be.

Resting invites us to consider:

What is left of me if I am not doing those things?

Who or what am I when I am at rest?

It offers us the time to tune into who we inherently are beneath our activity, roles, responsibilities, words, and actions.

A self, an essence with no conditions placed on it.

A being that is and is enough just as it is.

Rest introduces you to the effortless you that exists just because it does. Here you can learn to be ok in your incompleteness, with your to-do list undone, with work still in progress. It invites you to practice sitting in that place of not doing, to learn to tolerate, accept, inhabit, savour, and enjoy it.

Resting is letting you be in this moment, now, enough as you are.