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I’m halfway through a two-week period of personal retreat for myself which includes fasting, abstaining from alcohol, increased periods of meditation and prayer, and a lower activity level in general.

But it includes something I’m noticing particularly because it is so absent from my “regular” life, and that extraordinary thing is rest, times where I do absolutely nothing at all. If, as I wrote last week, American men tend to see kindness as unnecessary, I think we probably see rest as completely pointless.  In a society which is driven to accomplish, rest is misperceived as “failure to achieve.”

Rest is the essential feature of the consolidation period of our growth cycle. The natural world, from fields that yield our grains to your household cat, shows us rest as the other side of the coin of being productive and energetic. Seeds, trees and caterpillars go dormant. Rapidly growing babies sleep more than any of us. The more we produce with our lives, the more we need genuine periods of rest.

My usually feeble attempts at rest include going away on vacation (with two or three of those business management books I’ve been meaning to read for work) or deciding to take a few days off from work (with my laptop and an internet connection close by, of course.) Just a few….dozen…emails and a quick snoop around the internet can’t really hurt, right? Sound familiar?

Abstaining, for me, has been a very valuable discipline which supports rest, and which can be challenging and revelatory in a way that often surprises me. Our culture supports consuming and obtaining and seems to cock its head sideways at anyone who would voluntarily abstain from anything. “Why abstain? Life is yours to be had–eat, drink, buy, consume to your heart’s content! ”

Temporarily abstaining from food, for example, has shown me vividly how I turn to food for reasons other than hunger. When I’m bored, I want to eat. When I’m lonely, or tired, or antsy, or vaguely discontent, anxious, frustrated, or restless, those things all make me want to eat. I’ve explored that with great curiosity and some surprise this week. When I abstain from eating, I confront those issues head-on; there’s nowhere for me to go except to sit with my experience and see if I can deal with “lonely” some way other than by tearing open a bag of Ruffles and opening a beer!

I’ve had the same experience on silent retreats–when I abstain from speaking, talking my way around and out of my experience, I’m forced to confront that experience and, well, frankly, to feel it, which is less comfortable for me than talking about it or tearing open the bag. I have found the process of sitting quiet and still and gently with the uncomfortable to be the thing that moves me forward, that makes my container bigger, that allows me to embrace more of life than I would otherwise be able to do. Rather than squirming away from the uncomfortable, rest allows me to make peace with it, and abstinence is a practice which supports rest.

In Touch Practice, some of the most powerful moments of exchange are the resting moments, times where we find a dynamic physical balance (often in the sitting position) where both partners can lean into each other and simply rest, doing nothing, often for a period of minutes. I’ve written before about partners who have actually fallen asleep during the work. I have absolutely no doubt whatsoever that those times were as productive for them as the more active, vigorous “yang” aspects of practice are for others.

So, I’ll keep my blog short and sweet, for this week. I invite you to consider the place of rest in your life. Consider the valuable practice of abstaining.  There’s a long list of things that people try to abstain from, temporarily, in order to create a workshop where they can encounter their own experience mindfully.  Some of these include food, alcohol, caffeine, sex, “digital” connections such as facebook, texting, and internet; sweets, speaking, as well as many others.

None of these things is “bad” in and of itself; that’s not why we abstain. It’s not a value judgement on the thing itself, but rather an investigation into our relationship with the thing.  If I use junk food to comfort myself when I’m lonely or angry, then it can be an interesting experiment to take the junk food away, and see where else I can go in terms of learning to work with those states. You can try “no facebook for three days” or “no after-work snacks for a week” and see where those teachers point you, if you’re curious!

I wish you a productive (and restful) week.

Have thoughts you’d like to share?

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