How to Actually Get Some Rest

Mental activity, emotional activity, and physical activity cost energy.

How strong an emotional output is and the frequency it happens determine how much energy you're using.

The busier your mind, the more active your emotions, the more restless your body, the more energy you spend. Sprinting uses energy faster than walking because the intensity is higher.

Many people experience psychological pain when they sit still. They have a lot of trouble saving tomorrow's problems for tomorrow instead of looping in them.

When you aren't training or posting you're thinking about training or posting. When you're sitting in a hammock you're lost in daydreams and thoughts. And the more emotionally charged your thoughts...the more they feed your mind and encourage it to produce more of them. This leads to compounding costs, not rejuvenation. 

Many of my first year students don't have restful sitting practices. They tend to get lost in thought streams and sensations, constantly feeding their minds and working hard to subordinate irrational thoughts unrelated to their practice. The beginner skill level makes sitting REALLY hard work at first.

If the body is sitting, but the energy is unsettled, then your experience is restlessness.

If the body is exercising and the mind is lost in music then the body and mind are separate and that leads to energy loss as well. 

The mind must reside in the body for rest to occur.

The body must be resting. And the mind must be quiet. If the mind and body are quiet then the energy can become quiet. This quality lets the dust settle, and the more settled the dust the less energy is being wasted. This is a slowing down of energy expenditure that allows you to "catch up." 

Your energy and emotions anchor into different reflex zones in the body. For many people the first place this manifests is as a spleen deficiency. When these energies are harmonized the reflective organ is balanced. When too much of an emotion is present and ongoing, there's build up in the organ such that stagnation or deficiencies arise. The body's system responds. 

When the spleen is deficient (common during burnout) we see difficulty thinking or excessive thinking. We see loose stools, which is a symbol of processing data inefficiently, absorption is poor. This eventually leads to liver deficiencies, frustrations, and so on. This first starts in the mind and energy, which then anchors into the body. 

As the liver becomes deficient we see the tendons get tight and people become stiffer and injuries might occur. If this has gone on a long time and the body runs on reserves, the kidneys must convert essence into energy and this leads to further deficiencies. Stress exacerbates the problems. 

Each of these leads to build up and excess use of energy, not rest.

You learn when to analyze and when to reframe so you are most effective, spending the least amount of energy overthinking. Through this your mind becomes less busy and more restful. The quietness allows for more potential output in desirable directions rather than all your potency being lost focusing on mental noise. 

This must be cultivated and trained, no quick fixes will get you there. When this is paired with physical rest your rest becomes more nourishing and of a higher quality. Then you anchor more deeply into your body, bringing more energy in, and refining that energy such that it too is more potent. This leads to an improvement in internal alchemy as the conversion between spirit/information, energy, and essence builds rather than depletes.

It is very difficult for people to sit still with nothing to do. Originally I looked at this problem as a mind hunger/boredom problem, and to an extent it is, but you can’t change it the same way you navigate boredom. It’s something deeper that influences the experience of boredom and the agitation that arises.

Insufficiency shows up in many ways. When your parents only rewarded you for high levels of activity and success, sitting still prior to having some imaginary level of success will feel like the epitome of failure and create a high degree of psychological pain.

When you have problems to solve (that you don’t have the answers to) sitting still is extremely painful.

All you want is to have a period of time to rest, lounge, finally let go. But you can’t accept how it arrives or when it arrives because it flies in contrast to how you believe it should. You haven’t EARNED rest because rest must be earned through some amorphous quantity of efforting, activity, and succeeding.

You speak of patience while remaining entirely impatient. You’re not thinking about the problem in words, but the problem still exists in energy. You then act like ignoring it is the equivalent of patience. All the while you remain internally agitated, like you must go do something. You must fill your time because not doing so would be as insufficient and unworthy as you are.

And thus the music of your life is lost.

You think rest can come only after intensity. But then your music is crescendo after crescendo and becomes a monotonous loop of loud noises and activity. But subtle notes require silence. Slow moments still require silences.

When a lot has changed internally it’s easy to ignore that, as the external takes physical time to reflect the internal changes. It is all too common to see my students go through massive changes in perception and skill, only to focus upon what isn’t working as quickly as they want it to. This is a defense mechanism the system’s code uses to keep you the same.

Because it is REALLY challenging to be patient when you’ve been programmed your whole life to micromanage and generate constant activity.

But let’s say you just spent several months training, studying, traveling, and changing, and after all that you finally settle down in a new, unknown place.

The pot has been stirring for months.

And when you land you have an opportunity to NOT be busy. To not train. To not solve every single problem. To Trust.

You have an opportunity to embody your greatest fear: becoming Lazy.

People hate their lazy aspects. They judge them. They can’t be them no matter what. Even in the lull in their story, when their world is settling, laziness is so dangerous that they can’t even allow the dust to settle. They must DO something. They must research, they must explore, they must play, they must do anything besides be inactive or they’ll have to admit to themselves they’ve become everything their parents programmed them to hate and fear.

You hate what you love. You hate it because it’s different from your programmed expectation of it. While at the same time longing for it. Longing for permission to have periods of silence and be comfortable in them for as long as they last.

Silence is the unknown. Impatience is the dirt you fill it with because you’re too afraid to wait for the gems to be unearthed in their own time.

And while you sit there feeling guilty, instead of allowing energy to move, you create stagnation and pressure to act when no action is required of you.

You don’t know who you are outside of constant effort and activity. And because you still judge laziness and moments of silence your world comes in to confirm how much judgement you deserve.

People think that rest needs to come from a deficiency. That they must be tired to rest. But this is a misunderstanding of how energy works. Rest is not “I’ll take a 20 minute nap and get back to it.” Why does your system ask for that nap in the first place?

Think of the corporate vacation. You take a week off, but spend the whole week thinking about all of the emails you’re going to have to catch up on when you get back. Sure, you’re laying in the sun physically inactive. But you’re still holding an attachment to the problems. You’re pouring energy into them as if that solves them or will make them easier to manage when they finally arrive on your desk upon your return. Or you're trying your best to not think about the mountain of work that will be waiting for you when you return.

Your life calls you to rest exactly when you least want to rest. When you least want to sit still and be patient. When you least want to trust, when you most yearn for control.

The things you want in life come as a result of RHYTHM, which can only be created through the natural activity and rest your life puts you through. You can be noisy in silence and kill the harmonics of your music. You will experience the in between as painful rather than part of the excitement builder hidden in the music of your life.

It is easy to trust when your bills are paid and you have only psychological problems. But that isn’t where most of you are. You are being asked to trust while you’re in transition. While you’re figuring it out. You’re learning to not be attached to the problems by going through problems. And you can only learn this by experiencing this process directly. You can reread this article 1000 times, but intellectual understanding from the outside will not have you truly grasp what I’m saying here. You have to go through it so you can learn how deep this concept truly is.

You learn to rest by extending your period of trust. Right now your muscles are weak. You can’t trust for more than a few milliseconds without second guessing. But like I taught in these recent portals, find that gap and keep making it longer. This is a practice you do while you’re in the pudding, when your conflicting beliefs arise, when your inability to commit pressurizes you to escape. Can you try to trust for just one more moment before abandoning it?