Rest feeds your revolution
Plus, June 7 retreat discount
Today, we share the passage titled, Rest Feeds Your Revolution, from my book, Freedom: Medicine Words for Your Brave Revolution. Available at booksellers worldwide.
REST FEEDS YOUR REVOLUTION
Every single thing in your life
heals and blooms when you rest.
Your name is not exhaustion. You do not have to answer when called that way. Maybe exhaustion raised you at home. And exhaustion taught you at school. And exhaustion supervised you at work. And exhaustion was your Lover in relationships. Maybe you believe you are exhaustion. But, dear soul, you are not. You are life. A thing that breathes and releases and rests and sleeps and cries and crafts peace medallions from precious beads of moments. Even if all the people you have known have modeled exhaustion, you are not that species. You are a vibrant thing. Alive like spring meadows and freshwater sing. Blushing lotus, time to burn your false identity. You are not exhaustion. You are a winged thing shedding unnatural chrysalis, aloft toward bliss. You are diaphanous in sunlight. A bravery of spices. Pioneering stillness inside flocks of nervous geese. Powder blue flamingo adroit on silver water. Reunion with the code of Grace. You are not exhaustion. You reject that tragic race. No, priceless soul. You are not exhaustion. You are life. In Love with renewing your life. With a kiss. Like this.
Waging revolution takes immense energy from you. If you are not renewing yourself abundantly, continuously, you will exhaust yourself to death. If you are going to climb a mountain, bring food. If you cross a desert, bring water. If you jump into a volcano, insulate your body. And if you endeavor this freedom work, be passionate about your rest and restoration. However much you give yourself to servitude, give yourself at least that much to your wellness. Stay at the watering hole as long as you thirst. Stay in the shade until you are cooled. Remain in the intimate embrace of silence until your true voice returns. Nurturing your inner condition is a non-negotiable condition of revolution.
Don't be your own oppressor.
Rest. Rest. Rest.
Learn ease. Your life will go from exhausted productivity to vibrant fruitfulness. Exhausted, you drag negative spirit into the circle where your people live and breathe. Rested, you bring with you the sun itself. You bring sky. You bring life. Learn the power of heartfulness as a form of rest. If you grow weary as you serve others, do not blame them for your weariness. Open your heart to them even wider. Care deeply. Compassion fatigue is a popular term, yet it is a misnomer. Compassion does not fatigue. We do, when we abandon the infinite well of our compassion.
Would you rather get a hundred apples out of a tree for each of a few short years before it died of exhaustion, or forty apples a year out of the same tree for a hundred years? We aren’t speaking of apple trees. We are speaking of you. Learn how trees stay free. Learn fruitfulness.
The most productive revolutionary
activity of all is rest.
If the revolution tires you, such is the price for freedom. Slavery brings an exhaustion that makes revolution seem like a revival. If they can keep your body, mind, and spirit exhausted, they need no chains. Understand, your entire freedom depends on devoted rest. Make guilt-free rest your vocational calling. Do not segregate your rest. Let it flower all through your day.
If you are weary, rest.
If the thought of resting makes you anxious,
now you know why you are weary.
Please. No more working and doing yourself to death. Nothing about this is admirable. You know what is? Being healthy and available for your fullest life. We need you. Especially if you are contributing to a kind, compassionate, liberated, Loving world. New fad: renewal and balance. New role models: those who rest without shame or guilt. New culture: inner life. New you: peacefulness. Your new weather system: daily bliss.
Fatigue makes us want to surrender. This is why freedom workers need plentiful rest. Make rest the foundation of your revolution. More will get done. Not less. Sometimes, though, less needs to be done. Freedom breakthroughs can happen in the silence and respite in between roars.
We are so lost inside this unnatural way. When you grow tired, that is not a sign to push harder. It is a sign to let go of pushing. Remember peace, dear soul. Breathe deeply and remember peace. Consuming-culture creates a harsh, urgent desperation in the way we treat ourselves. Communal, earth culture births gentleness.
Sleep is a reboot for your brain. It clears all the file fragments, viruses, and damage accumulated during the day, protecting you from anxiety, depression, dementia, disease, and a broad host of human maladies. Don't treat sleep as a lazy inconvenience. That's cultural toxicity. Treat sleep like a lifesaving deep treatment for your frozen electronic device that holds every important file from your entire life. Supercharge your brain and being. Go to sleep.
Do you practice the excuse that you don’t have time to rest? This is the classic, conditioned thought we use to neglect rest. If you lose your health, you will find more than enough time. Everything in our life is a matter of care and priority. We choose what to find time for. It doesn't take extraordinary time to close our eyes, exhale, and let our body release tension even for a few seconds. We spend cumulative hours on things that don't benefit us. A simple adjustment to our attitude about being well and valuing ourselves makes all the difference. You don't have to find the time. It's all around you.
Busyness is a cultural disease.
Cure yourself.
Simplicity blesses a revolution. To stay in touch with your growth journey and with your peace and clarity, practice asking yourself, Does it nourish me? The question, and the answer, can set you free. This is a way to develop spirit discernment, learning to see what is good for you and what is not. Does it nourish me? The question is a filter. It helps you purify your life. Here's to your soulful freedom. From all forms of oppression. Especially oppression of yourself. May you be nourished, you beautiful living thing.
Rest is a powerful and critical resource for a revolutionary. Profound rest requiring sacrifice of ways common in a supremacy society. Rest in the form of continuous shedding of social dynamics, rivers sourced from supremacy and flowing toward oppression. Continuous rejection and release of energy sapping oppression narratives. Rest that births true, restorative solitude and silence. Rest at the frequency of healing, whose womb is silence. Rest in virtually each moment of each day. It is not easy to learn to deeply rest in the midst of active living and human interaction. This takes devotion and commitment to restfulness. And to peacefulness, the cradle for rest.
Don't just pretend to rest. Rest is not a rehearsal. It is a sacred ceremony birthing your new life. Not physically working is not the same as resting, dear soul. If your mind still labors, your body still tires. Your nerves still fray. Your spirit still grows weary. Healthy societies honor renewal. Sick societies encourage exhaustion. Your guilt about resting enslaves your generations and makes your oppressor joyful. You need gatherings. Rest is a gathering for your soul. Make these things your lifestyle: retreat, respite, solitude, quietude, contemplation, release, self-forgiveness, daydreaming. Re-womb yourself. Let your mind fall into peace. You can learn to let go of the adrenaline-soaked tasking rope, and breathe. Practice letting go of the rope. Each time, reassure yourself: I heal now so I can work more beautifully in the garden of my miraculous life.
Exhaustion is not a requirement for being an admirable person. The only ones who benefit from your guilt about resting are those who have been exploiting your labor and body all along. When you break down, you and your Loved ones and circle of relations lose. When you wake up into your rightful restfulness, all your relations gain true wealth. Lost souls planted false seeds in your ancestors that have sprouted in you. Those seeds say one thing: Do not rest. Maybe, BeLoved, it is time to remove that generational story and plant new seeds. Maybe changing the world and birthing freedom begins with a deep breath, self-permission, and you resting into your natural, optimal, undepleted self. Maybe your best life is a rest life. Come taste this heavenly fruit.
She gave herself permission to rest.
Her soul said, Finally. And gave her life.
BeLoved, even a single, conscious breath is life-restoring rest. Sleep deprivation is killing us. Chronic adrenaline state is killing us. We believe we can work ourselves to life. Instead, we work ourselves to death. Value your life. Seek sacred balance. Remember, sleep is how the body and brain heal, purge, and prevent disease. Rest is the foundation for fruitfulness. If you want life, behave like all other living things, and rest. You will have life.
People will come, ravenous for the fruits of your labor. Then grow to feel entitled to your labor. You are not a plow. You are not a plow horse, meant to strain until you die. You are abundance and its way into this world. Protect your vessel. You are an entire field of beauty, meant for an abundant life.
You do not rest only for you. You rest for everyone, everything. Resting is not selfish. It is communal. You rest for your ancestors, because they couldn't. You rest for your descendants, so you may leave them a more nourishing world. You rest for all living things, so you may be medicine and not a destroyer. You rest for the birthing of dreams. You rest to remember. You rest to bring us back to sacredness. When you rest, your restfulness exudes out into the community, into the circle. We take on your restful energy and give it back to you, deepened by our collective restfulness. When you rest, you are contributing your wealth into the collective wealth. You are making a social offering. Please, you priceless treasure. Bless us with rest.
We used to rest together. Naturally and in rhythm with each other. Without protocols or programs, we would listen to our great teachers, our bodies, and instinctively lie down together in our homes, in courtyards, under trees, in meadows, by cool streams and rustling willows, wherever we were. This ceremony was a root for our togetherness. It kept us well. No one was self-conscious about resting because everyone rested. And because we rested, everything else in our lives was richer, more robust and fertile. Rest calmed us through life's ups and downs. We were not depressed or anxious, because our hormonal river was regulated. We were more patient, kind, creative. More present, attentive, aware, sensitive. More fruitful in our labor. We were more alive. It is important for us to understand, this restful way of being was violently taken from us by souls who wanted to exploit our wellness, to turn it into a soulless, indentured labor for their material gain. The reason we no longer rest together is because our togetherness was too beautiful for those hungry ghosts to bear. They had to destroy it. Yet we remain. We need to remember now that we used to rest together. It is our heritage. Can you remember this? If you can grow still and quiet, the memories may wake in you: those days when we were peaceful and lay down together on earth's maternal chest. To rest. As though it were the most natural, life-giving thing. Because it was.
Productivity is a way of life obsessed with product, even to the detriment of life. It begs for burnout. Its natural endpoint is depletion of resources, actual extinction of the material world. Productivity conditions us into a phobic relationship with the world. Everything is a potential threat to our urgent, possessive quest to produce. We become desecrators of everything sacred, because Sacredness cannot be exploited until we make it not sacred. This is how we desecrate even ourselves. For ultimately we view our own being, our bodies and other aspects as highly accessible resources for our insatiable hunger. We cannibalize ourselves to be productive. Fruitfulness, in contrast, is a way of life devoted to fruit, always to the benefit of life. Fruit as natural yield from natural cycles of sustenance living. In fruitfulness we value all the fruits of life. We see all fruits as existing in close relation, a seeing that helps us keep our life elements in relative balance and harmony. Fruitfulness endears soul into union with the world. We become nurturers and birthers, protectors and healers of living things. Our relationship to resources mirrors our relationship with ourselves: philic, not phobic. We experience the world not as a threat or exploitable commodity, but as a thing we Love, cherish, and therefore honor. May your revolution be fruitful.
A culture that encourages you to do more, to the point of exhaustion and illness, is not evolved. Practice doing less without guilt and watch how your life grows fertile and free. The more you are marginalized by society, the more society guilts you into doing more. You become fearful of being labeled lazy, unproductive, valueless, inferior, unworthy, undesirable, undeserving. To free yourself of this conditioned slavery, to ignite self-Love in your soul, try this mantra: I have the human right to do less. Doing less, I am enriched with health, rest, peace, balance, and fruitfulness. I am enough. I do enough. I achieve enough. My life, my being, my existence are enough.
I am deeply empathic.
Therefore I rest.
If you are deeply empathic, you get this. You are doing soul labor in every moment that others aren't. You cannot afford to measure your rest against theirs. Even for them, many are exhausted and dying. For you, feel, rest, stay alive. Grant yourself permission for quiet, calm, stillness, peace in bushels. No guilt or shame to your resting game. They will slave you to death. Break that generational oppression chain. Your candle burns intensely. You need more wick. Your life force is that wick. Renew it continuously. Your deep feeling, intuitive nature requires that you become a sayer of No. No to giving more, doing more, dying more. Beautiful, Loving, honoring, respectful No's. Flocks of No's that give birth to Yes's. Yes to retreat, renewal, restoration, refill, recharge, rebirth. Romance your rest. Learn to rest through it all. Rest when you are alone. Rest immersed in a sea of souls. Rest in spirit even when you are with community, family, friends, and your wilderness ancestors. Look up at the sky, exhale and rest. Imitate a tree and rest. Rest is your treasure chest. Each time you open it, jewels of blessing. Not stressing or pressing. Resting. Rest as you listen, guide, nurture, lead, and comfort. Rest while you sleep. You think you're smooth, pretending sleep, deep feeling your way through the night. Let it go. Drop down into the peace sleep beyond concern and let your entire being heal. You are a healer, a feeler, a deep dealer. So say it until you live it: I confess, I am at my best and blessed when I rest.
Some species are so exhausted from gestating, birthing, caring, or building, they die after their offering. You are not one of them. Rest, birth, rest, care, rest, build, rest again, dear one. Rest joyfully. Jubilantly. As though you have every right. Because you do. A sustainable life is one in which you rest abundantly. You are making a whole new world, restoring the ancestral ways. Not by doing. By resting all the way back to your full power. Let your faithful brain heal. Let your dutiful body heal. Let your loyal heart heal. Let your brazen spirit heal. Let your whole life heal. Make that your offering. Show us the freedom way.
If you want to help heal the world, slow down. Breathe, you precious treasure. In your frenetic daily rushing, you outrun even your own spirit. You need your spirit to stay in Spirit, your place and source of discernment and true seeing. Lose this and you become harmful to yourself and the world. Those who want to profit from the world's chaos, from humanity's confusion, need you to keep rushing. That way, you won't be seeing. Or being. Only doing. Addicted, chronic doing is a critical epidemic. You can feel it in the air around you. Everywhere humans are or have been. It is contagious. Keep your soul's immune system strong. Stay in your spirit: Stillness. Silence. Rest. Contemplation. Breathing. Loving. Stay in your spirit. This is how you make medicine with your holy life.
Jaiya John
Freedom: Medicine Words
for Your Brave Revolution
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