Restful Thoughts - Written February, 2020
Resting, amidst societies forcused on action, doing, competing, achieving, capturing cognizance of success purely in relation to comparison with similar specied beings, although conceptually foreign to few, has a prevalence of being relegated to less-conscious focus in the background of the course of life, allowing beings (humans, really I'm talking about) to skip right on through and give little or no credence to the necessity nor the power of allowing the resting states to assume consumption of the beings' energetic states and thrust forth with restorative and healing presence.
Resting is the dialectic component to action, and completeness necessarily must encompass both extreme poles of any dialectic invocation occurring within third dimension perspective. Let's pan out to the more abstract for the moment. Your world is of three physical dimensions. You have the two dimensional plane for moving around, and you have the third for perspective (and some moving around there too, but you are gravitationally anchored in the localized two dimensional plane). The perspective dimension, being rooted in the two dimensional plane, inherits a two-state basis for the vast spectrum of perspectives in physical life. Thus the dialectic nature of conceptualizations within physical world existence, resulting in graspable opposites, compilable as an endless list - happy/sad, life/death, rich/poor, hot/cold, activity/rest... For the mathematically inclined, this is why second order differential equations are so prevalent in your worldly engineering and physics. Oft comprised of solutions of compound trigonometric functions, sine/cosine, etc., of oscillatory nature between two-state endpoints, opposite to each other.
Now, the nature of your world, being of limited dimensions, is of projection. You are seeing, feeling, hearing, touching, the filtered result of energy of infinite dimensional origin, and in interaction with the forefront of your world, getting the filtered result that defines your physical experience. Yet, the perspective of this filtered nature has underlying within it, the completeness of the all, everything in your world, including you, as culmination of infinite energy, ingraspable from within the sensors and thought processes of the normal human body and mind. Yet, completeness, what constitutes everything in your world, including you, is inseparable from the infinite energetic constitution of all presence within your world.
Knowing this, and knowing that your experience has a prevalence of dialectic opposites which allow you to grasp conceptually the threads of truth which define your lives, what you do have at your fingertips, in the interest of invoking completeness, completeness in your experience, and completeness of you, as beings, in the interest of achieving wholeness, is the allowance of presence of the extremes of the dialectic poles, and the allowance of energetic mergence through the paths defined by these poles. Conceptually this is simple, but practitionally, it really entails a change in paradigm from the way most of you think and live. The role models are really right before your eyes. Light, for instance, electromagnetic energy comprised of complex oscillations of varying frequencies, does this naturally. Light doesn't try to cling to one pole, as you tend to do when you get caught up in the competitive nature of life, feeling as though you must always do, do, do, and don't stop to think long enough to allow rest, and its immense power, to bring completeness to your physical experience.
The human nature is to gravitate toward the active states, the doing, that which is recognized and noticeable. I suppose this is part of the novelty of being human at all, because inheriting a physical substance of body allows for experiential conditions that are not otherwise possible in pure energetic states. However, completeness of being entails integrating the passive with the active, recognizing the role of the passive as inherent component of the complete picture. Consider, for instance, the painting of an object. It takes about one experience of ignoring the allowing of the drying of the paint as part of the process to realize its importance. The drying of the paint is the passive which is as much of importance in the painting experience as the painting itself. But humans will have an innate tendency to focus on the active part almost exclusively - the colors, the painting itself - and to get impatient when it gets to the passive stage which really allows the whole painting event to reach crystallization of completeness.
The impatience cited in this analogy of painting an object is a key to the resolution of the dilemma created in regard to ignoring the importance of resting in life. Because even if understood cognitively, resting is good - resting heals - etc., the emotion needed to really manifest this in support of Wholeness of being often eludes the human who is continually caught up in the course of activity of life and seeking fulfillment through an imbalanced perspective of importance of the doing states with the passive complements to them being ignored, or at best relegated to the background. What needs to happen, in the interest of Wholeness of being, is for the psyche to integrate that the presence of the passive pole is inextricable from the more readily acknowledged active pole. This is really a fundamental principle that is pervious to human life. The shifting in understanding this, and the basis for instituting paradigm of understanding that leads to powerful integration of this principle must occur at the deep emotional level, and must occur through understanding of the presence of the passive poles of all facets of life, with the depth of conscious understanding recognizing the significance of active/passive as equal complements, of equal significance, which must both be allowed presence along the course of life experience.
So, we are really talking here about establishing the emotional healing which will form a basis for operating in life to follow a path of Wholeness as a human being, as much as possible. The focus is on resting, a big one which affects all humans, and many facets of human life. So, let's talk in more specifics about resting, and what you can do to heal your imbalance which excludes the power of resting from your experience.
Everyone knows about sleep, and under normal conditions how sleep is to bring rest. As sleep is integral to human life, finding ways to assert its necessity when the human body goes for a time without sleep, presence of sleep cycles in the human experience are as though the human realm were designed to assure that resting is going to happen even if it must be semi-autonomous to do so. However, this also means that you can go about life and while in the waking state, give little or no thought to resting unless the need for sleep becomes prominent enough. And many of you, particularly the high achievers or personalities more subject to approaching life in a stressful, burdensome way, do just that!
So, you know what happens when you do that. You push yourself. You feel time-pressed to do things, to get things done. You sleep less, and your sleep can even become restless, where the resting is not allowed to happen to the point it needs to. And in the extremes, you can become sick, wherein your body is all but demanding that you take time out for resting. So you rest because you must, and your body heals from the sickness, usually, but often with impatience to do so because you are anxious to get back to the doing, doing doing...
If you will be aware, shift your conscious understanding, that resting is a necessary complement to the states of action on which you place such high importance, and make resting part of your life, part of your planned interaction with life, your emotional healing will bring you to a more relaxed state and it will become natural for you to expect resting to happen, and your life will occur in ways that allow time for resting, and your sleep will be entered with the expectancy that restorative rest will happen, rather than seeing it as an interruption of your main events of the active part of your life.
In making this shift, you will assume power. What really happens when you sleep, when you really rest, is that you are releasing the tension that is present on the physical human level, and allowing the pure energy that constitutes your being to come forth and restore your being to its natural state of harmonic energy balance. The releasing of this tension comes through integration of understanding that the passive, resting state, is just as significant in the course of your experience, as all of the activity which consumes the lion's share of your waking attentive states. Try to understand this deeply and take a new paradigm with regard to the role of rest in your life.
Rest easy and rest well!
-Christopher