THE POWER OF REST

Rest is a word that feels far out of our reach but that is also filled with so much longing. We often say I will do this, and this, and this, and then I will have a more restful life, and live more slowly. But we often forego those actions that we say will lead to rest in favour of action, of doing. For me personally, when I am feeling unwell or dealing with health stuff, I know the first thing that I need to do is rest. But in order for me to do that, I need to have someone to take care of the children. And as we don’t have family that are in our lives or that can help us, I find that I have to beg for support and as a result, the rest that is calling to me gets pushed aside as I keep battling on. And I prolong the time it takes for me to feel better.

I am Australian and Australia is a country of displaced people. That is to say, I live in a society where you have to work and work and work. Rest is not the priority. There is an attitude of surviving because in order to keep a roof over your head and food in your mouth, you must keep going. It is one of the most expensive countries in the world and ultimately we find ourselves caught up in its system.

But not everywhere is like this. Some peoples still live with the tribal mentality of taking care of eachother. One of the things that comes to mind is the slums in India. The reason the slums keep moving is because they always stick together. I’ve lived in India for six months and from the outside looking in, it is a most jarring phenomenon as it’s more akin to our perception and definition of chaos – it is difficult to think that this works but it’s only because we misunderstand it. In reality, it works, as everything good does, from the inside out. On the inside, the people are helping and supporting one another.

When I lived in Europe and the UK (outside of London), people had that same mentality of sticking together and helping each other. Just like my example above, these people are living with a completely different mentality and culture. Where I used to live, there would be people from different ethnicities and all walks of life working together, pulling their knowledge and resources together, asking each other for advice and support. It was not unusual to ask for something, to ask for help, to reach out to someone for support. It was normal. It was how everyone managed to raise kids, work and buy a home, with the support of the community.

There was a family living on my street who went through a really traumatic experience. The woman was pregnant and the couple discovered that the baby didn’t have a brain stem and they had to go through a series of awful procedures. Without a hesitation, the woman asked that, if through all this, we would watch their other child. The answer was obvious. There was no hesitation from either side - something I have not witnessed in this country.

Funnily enough, I saw a post on social media that said something like: I want to be asked to come over and help put their kids to bed as casually as they might text their spouse to pick up milk on the way home.

And it got me thinking of all of the those things mentioned and many more that I would love to do for my neighbours, for the people I lived with and around in my community: I want to stop and pick up milk on the way home for another friend because I know they don’t like to go to the grocery store. I want to pick up someones kids from their school because their mother had a client. I want to pass homegrown veggies over the fence and take my neighbour’s bins out when they forget. I want to do the dishes in other people’s houses and send extra food wrapped up in worn tea towels so it’s warm when they drop it off. I want to have a basket of other people’s mending by my couch. I want to be surrounded by reminders that asking for help and support from one another is what we were born to do.

This is the tribal mentality.

This feels familiar because this is typically what families do together and for each other. But this is not often the way it is. I do have friends who say they have to beg for their parents to leave the house, and I always tell them to be grateful that they are there to help raise the children. Because the truth is that when we overlook ourselves because we don’t have this support system: we fall into these dark places of wondering, with no hope, how we are ever going to get out of this on our own. It happens to me often. Everything is bleaker when we’re alone on the inside.

The reality for most people is that they are struggling alone to have a business or a job, to keep themselves and a family fed, to pay the bills and stay afloat. But we weren’t meant to do this alone. If you are in a situation like this, you are supposed to have the support of a village. But we don’t live in villages anymore. We live in this culture where it’s me, myself and I.

Where we currently live, I do not know my neighbours; I couldn’t tell you their names or what they’re like or what they’re good at, or what their favourite dessert is. They don’t wave when they see you getting in or leaving the house. When I used to live in Byron Bay, sure the neighbours would wave but there was still this underlying jealousy. I’ve noticed that there is this kind of “tall poppy syndrome”, of people always looking over to what someone else has and I am sure many of you know what I am talking about.

Returning to this idea of rest, I often wonder how we are ever supposed to rest, how we are ever supposed to gain clarity and feel like we are resurrecting ourselves out of something without the support we desire and need. Everytime I feel like I need rest, there is something really big that I am avoiding or that I am not allowing to come to the forefront of my mind to acknowledge and to work through it. Over the last week alone, this block has resulted in my experiencing a lot of pain in the area where one of my kidneys used to be. And let me tell you that if you are missing a few organs in your body like I am, the rest of them have to work harder to compensate.

rest is a return of something that was taken away, a restitution of what was once there but is now not seen.

In my definition, rest is short for restoration. And what is restoration? Restoration is a renewal, revival, an act of re-establishment and restoring. So when you allow yourself to lay down, to turn the email off, to turn the phone off, to put a movie on, whatever it might be without any responsibility, rest is a return of something that was taken away, a restitution of what was once there but is now not seen.

One of the ways we might heal is to allow ourselves to get into the space of pain. So, for instance, if you have pain in your knee, you might get in a bath (you know how much I love a bath) or lay in your bed and allow yourself to feel, to go into the centre of your pain. Because too often we try to push it aside, but by allowing yourself to go into the centre of your pain, to the source and and allowing it to swallow your body and allowing whatever emotion that is there to come to the surface, to overwhelm you. This is the space where rest becomes healing. But how can you allow for this healing when rest feels unavailable, foreign, out of reach without that support? How can you invite more rest into your life?

Following the Wheel of the Year and the days of the week, rather than looking at the numbers on the calendar is a really beautiful way that you allow different themes on different days to influence and flavour the way you live. If there are different archetypes, gods and goddesses that are associated with different days of the week, then we can harness their particular energy. For example, Monday, Moon Day, is ruled by the moon. And although there are things that I need to do in business, and responsibilities I need to tend to, I might ask myself how I can invite more rest on that day. What does rest look like for me on a Monday?

Let me be clear that sitting down to do a meditation is not rest. Rest is lying down, be it in a hammock, on a beach, in a bed, and allowing yourself to be restored and your cup to be filled up again. And if we take this same principle and apply it to the Wheel of the Year, by looking to Nature and her phases, reminding ourselves of the myth of Demeter and Persephone, we see these changes: of the dry, inward Winter season that precedes the livelier spring: the shorter days and nights versus those longer ones. And although they are on opposite sides, the energies of these transitions are asking us to rebirth into a new version of ourselves, to brace what is yet to come. Which brings us back to the meaning of rest and restoration: these changes in the days and seasons are invitations toward rest, toward renewal, revival, and re-establishment… If I allow myself to feel the pain, to go into the discomfort I am experiencing, what is waiting to be revived; what is waiting to be re-established? How am I able to restore my being? What does it need? And who of those that have helped me along the way can I honour? Perhaps it was the author of a book that revived a feeling or idea. Perhaps it was a Ted Talk by Brené Brown that reestablished your core values and what is important to you. Perhaps it’s a teacher that you've had in your life that saw something in you and believed in you and gave you what you needed to succeed as the original belief. How can you restore yourself to find restitution in your life from what you're experiencing?

This is an extension of Ritual and why Ritual within our daily life is so important. Because ritual is renewal, it is this thing that allows us to come back to ourselves through physical movements, actions and words. There is an order to ritual: as a series of things that we do that helps our mind, our body and our soul and our emotional body to be able to re-establish and come back to ourselves so that we are fully in alignment. Ritual in the ways that it combines and integrates all aspects of the self, swoops in with the force of a thunderbolt, combining all of these aspects of the self, and allows us to return to who we are, to our essence, to our desires.

So at this time on the Wheel of the Year, on Samhain in the Northern Hemisphere and Beltane in the Southern Hemisphere, I will share a beautiful ritual that honours these changes within and without. Stay tuned!

Amoureuse,

Brooke x