How do you rest? Do you feel rested and what is it to feel totally rested?
Netflix and chill, although a popular answer to this question, this method of rest does not leave us rested. The mind is running wild after being synthetically stimulated and we struggle to switch off at all. Sometimes waking up with a mind buzzing from the night before.
Across the two conversations we explored different active and passive ways we rest and recover. From social interaction, walking, horse-riding, playing a musical instrument, writing, fasting and simply sleeping as much as possible in a day.
I benefit from a day of sleep and fasting every once in a while. My body’s energy goes into repair mode; detoxifying and resting my digestive system. After a resting fast day I feel I have a reserve tank of energy, an energy that pushes me forward into life, that creates an effortless listening. I feel inspired and I can love myself with ease.
How much of our modern day afflictions are due to lack of rest?
Depression, low self-worth, reactivity, etc?
How much or our lack of resolution to make the changes we need for the environment could be fixed by going to bed?
We are an exhausted society and this makes us vulnerable to manipulation. Our energy is taken away from us due to a debt based economy, and the industrial revolution driving men and women into the workforce and away from the house and environment. We work our whole lives away and are happy to have 4 weeks holiday a year, or just two weeks for the U.S and much less in China. Then we look at other countries who spend their days sleeping, socialising, and observing the happenings in the street or jungle and call them lazy and uncivilised. Is to work like a robot the product of civilisation? To work ourselves to death?
Our energy is taken away from us and then sold back to us through consumerism. Advertisements of young healthy and free humans wearing designer clothes. We buy the clothes but what we really desire is the health and the energy they exude.
This is the point where it seems super obvious that we have manipulated ourselves to appease the economy, to win the race for the greatest GDP. Why?
Money, gold, raw commodities, ever since we started to prepare for the problems of tomorrow we have forgotten the present and ignored our bodies to keep to a schedule to guarantee a future that we will never experience because reason favours a continual preparation for the scarcity of the future.
Industry, government and banks have discovered that this is a very profitable story. The scarcity mentality and the constant preparation for a future as a consequence creates us human beings as very good consistent paying customers.
Change is an exhausting experience. We are reliable consumers, too comfortably ill in our routines to make any great changes. Even our illnesses have become profitable.
So how do we break free from this hamster wheel serving the 1%?
We go to bed!
‘The greatest rebellion is to act as if we are already free.’ - human
What does this look like?
We do what we want to do?
We rest and discover the huge amount of energy we have access to. We listen and tune into the pace of the greater nervous system and her overflowing abundance. We say no to the economic game feeding on our lives.
We celebrate the dole bludger, the non compliant wild human who decides to sleep all day, the wandering poet who lives under the tree outside my window and the indigenous humans who have been made to feel like trash through the eyes of our consumerist facade.
Comments