Rest

I created a draft for this back in September when I first posted about my “Season of Rest.” I had the idea that it would be a series all about what I learned about myself as I took time to slow down, to savor life. You can read the words I wrote in that initial draft:

What my days look like in rest.

I am here to tell you: I have no idea.

I anticipated resting this fall after stepping back from a lot of activities. In my mind, I had this “master plan” that I would take a month or two, figure life out, and then be back in the swing of things and in a good routine that allowed for exercise and a full time job and meaningful time spent with my husband and time to be creative and to write… and as you can see I just wrote a list of impossible nonsense.

I am not super woman. I never will be.

And you cannot rush rest.

I have learned this slowly: that rest comes with time and a continual kindness to self. I’m not very good at being kind to myself. I tend toward the classic definition of the creative personality: someone who thinks in dreams and enjoys quiet time; but I am also somehow a Type-A personality: driven and rigid and impatient.

The dynamic creates a subtle internal war: be more, do more, more creatively, and with more showmanship. I am, as always, my own worst enemy. I fear failure, so I push harder. I shame myself, and then, of course, feel more shame.

I know this about myself, and I still push. I was chiding myself for not exercising this last week, not having made time for it the same week I started a new job. So I guilt-ed myself into going to yoga (please, laugh at the irony of that statement. I am, in retrospect). I needed to get up and move, to do anything but sit at a desk. I recently started going to the studio down the street from my apartment, and this particular evening I headed into a beginner’s class, thinking I might as well start at square one.

The teacher was patient and kind, helping us get into basic poses and explaining the foundations of each one methodically. I, impatient, wanted to “just do yoga.” No one had ever taken the time to do fundamentals with me before, and while I knew deep down it was good for me (my inner self so often has a better understanding of the world), I wanted to go and move and do and not stand and listen. So I attempted patience: I watched and moved slowly, as the teacher instructed. And when we got to the end of the class, in our last major pose before the ending, the shavasana, she made sure to tell us that if we needed to come out of the pose before she instructed us to, that we should listen to our bodies and do so. She mentioned that one of the first tenets of yoga was “do no harm to self,” also called ahimsa. She meant literally – we are not to do any pose that would harm our bodies – but throughout the class she emphasized the importance of taking our yoga practice “off the mat”: of taking the idea of discernment and mindfulness into our everyday lives.

I think she also meant for us to take ahimsa with us, too. To be kinder to ourselves as we go about life. As we fail and make hard decisions and start new adventures.

So I’m trying. I’m trying to be kinder to myself, but it’s hard. It takes time to create a routine, and being kind to oneself might be the hardest routine for us to begin (although I’m still often stuck on the flossing scale of the Adult Routine Hierarchy. Why are the good-for-you-things so hard?).

Another slow lesson: routine comes with repetition, through trial by fire. Even the routine of self-kindness. A person cannot retreat for a week, recreate life, and re-emerge doing everything right all the time. It does not happen that way. Life does not happen that way.

You have to give it time and space and the undivided attention it needs.

So this is what I am learning in my “Season of Rest” – to give myself grace and to love the process as much as the end result.

Will you join me? 

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In case, like me, you always want to read more, here are some links about rest, shame, and routine:

The Hard Things are Worth It by Carolyn Kopprasch at Buffer

On Thing My Soul is Begging Me to Do by Emily Freeman at Chatting at the Sky

Ahimsa for Yourself by Connie L. Habash at Awakening Self

The book Daring Greatly by Brené Brown, as well as her 2010 Ted Talk

5 Scientific Ways to Build Habits that Stick by Gregory Ciotti at 99U