Returning

I’ve noticed in myself this year an increased reactiveness, and a proximity to anger or tears, that feels new to me. It upsets me. Since my spiritual awakening at 25 I’ve spent a lot of time getting to know myself, witnessing my thoughts, feelings, actions, and impulses and attempting to, for lack of better words, better myself through the gradual change that occurs when I make conscious choices in as many moments as possible. Choices that incrementally put me on the path of patience, generosity, understanding, gratitude and discernment.

But over the last couple years, and this year in particular, I find myself immediately condemning other drivers, more likely to go into a feeling of tearful helplessness or defensiveness if confronted with someone else’s panic/rush/frustration directed at me. I’ve noticed I’m more regularly responding to any kind of stress, frustration, or blockage with either irritability, judgement or tears. Yes pandemic, yes, career stress, yes signs of climate change, yes isolation, yes. Many reasons. But for my own heart and mind it’s not enough to feel justified, or to understand the context in which I’m having these experiences. I know these to be the signs of a taxed nervous system and while concoctions with milky oats, tulsi and skullcap have made their way into my practices I also want to, as much as possible, choose pathways of life that support my presence, peace and joy. In other words, I want to do what I can to modify how I am interacting with this broader context, how I am practicing a healthy nervous system into being.

What I’m noticing: Panic and fear have a way, for me, of pushing me into overdrive- a seeking of fullness and distraction in every moment, perhaps a dopamine hook, and an avoidance of certain thoughts and feelings. This behavior reinforces a fear of feeling certain feelings, namely grief and uncertainty. This behavior also means that I can be on a kind of urgency autopilot for weeks, not really pausing or staying present in my life. In truth months can pass like this. There is so much that pushes me towards living like this, and it’s a highly exploitable state for corporations and almost any business or technology that can hook into that dopamine cycle or offer some kind of solution to those uncomfortable feelings.

Recently I was a part of a Rest Fellowship with the School of Embodied Praxis and the Haus of Glitter. It was a deeply nourishing program and through all the practices, insights, and experiences that were offered I would say that my awareness of what rest is has changed completely. There is more to say on this, but for now I will say that I went into the program thinking rest=sleep, and that I have come out with a far more subtle and nuanced understanding of what rest is, how it is inside us, how to create it or find it, and all the infinite ways, personal and political, that it is essential to our personal and communal becoming. Anyway. One of the insights that I keep returning to is the idea of stopping all forward momentum, or as School of Embodied Praxis founder Alexx Temena says, “No gaining.”

If the cultural narrative of unending economic growth has a personal corollary, for me it’s what I call overdrive, or the push to use every waking moment as some kind of productivity. And if there is an alternate/antidote to that compulsion, it is the practice of “not gaining.” Pausing, stopping for as long as it takes to receive. Think of listening rather than speaking, of noticing rather than creating, of landing in the body of now rather than living in the future of what we’re trying always to become. No gains, no trying, no strategizing, no future, no past, no productivity, just… stop. Can I just stop for a minute? Long enough for the raining magic of stars to catch in the corner of my eye and wend it’s way through my blood to my glowing anticipatory heart?

There are some things I need to do today, and even just taking the time to explore this has felt like a luxury I don’t often give myself. But it also connects me to my life in a way I find restorative and joyful. For me, today, rest looked like sitting with my tea in the newly bright corner of my bedroom and writing. Rest, as Alexx also helped me see, isn’t always about sleeping, laying down, or “not doing anything.” Sometimes rest is going for a walk or a run, playing music… it is listening to my body and sussing out the medicine of the moment that will help me be in my body, in my life, more completely. “Embodiment is mental rest.”

While a part of my mind is interested in understanding why my nervous system is so taxed, (pandemic? moving away from community? higher stress/pressure job? buying a house and moving again? expensive problems in said house? changing hormones of getting older? all of these things?) today I’m sitting with the reality that it has been hard for me to simply drop in each day with what I need, to identify what brings me into full embodiment and then to do it. I’m also sitting with the blooming desire to feel more embodied, day by day, moment by moment. This knowledge is never gained, only practiced. And I have been guilty of “knowing” it and not practicing it. With a lot of humility I sit with the embodiment of that today.

A note on privilege

Having the time to do this is a form of luxury, a form of privilege. Our current economic system has created classes of working people who need to work 2-3 jobs in order to maintain their lives. These systems are oppressive to everyone and we need to change them. The ends of the economic spectrum look different but the white supremacy cooked into the soul of capitalism is soul eroding to all of us. I believe a part of the necessary movement is to be grounded in a different paradigm, to begin with giving myself (ourselves, but I prefer to speak in the “I”) permission to subvert the dominant paradigms, to live into an alternate identity, an alternate experience, and to allow my actions, thoughts and words to emerge from that cultivated space of connectedness with complete cycles rather than addiction to unending growth, stimulation and gain.

I think it’s important to say that neither the ability to either be productive, or to feel good in ones practice of rest, are evidence of willpower or moral superiority, but primarily the social context in which we hope to belong. The “rise and grind” culture as well as much of new age spirituality have perpetuated a destructive narrative that it is a personal failing when we are unable to modify our participation in these systems, rather than the failure of our broader national “community” and systems of support. We are social creatures and all of our behavior emerges from the need to belong, even to belong with those, or that, which is unhealthy to us. Thus oppression is maintained internally. Resources grant the privileged more power to determine which communities they have access to and can therefore rely on for the support needed to undergo personal change and healing.

So the difficulty, culturally speaking, lies more in that the alternate narratives of rest, self-care, and dis-identifying with productivity haven’t gained enough traction to truly contend with the momentum of social pressures compelling all of us towards these beliefs and behaviors. They haven’t meaningfully pervaded corporate spaces or ethos, or meaningfully brought into question the problematic national narrative of bootstrap individualism. Everyone needs spaces where we can rest and belong without sacrificing essential elements of our wellbeing such as income or inclusion.

So for now it is more work to separate out, to choose something different. And it is far more work for certain people than others.