I read an interesting article by Martha Beck, Making Time for Nothing which was, preceded by a lovely quote … “Finding yourself doesn’t require that you fly to Tibet, join a convent, or build a meditation room. Just consistently keep a minimal commitment to empty time.”

We all know how busy our lives are and it’s almost the standard response when asking someone how they are; “Ja, well, busy.”  I think many of us are struggling with this crazy busyness, but have literally accepted it as the norm; out of our hands; just got to live with it.  Yet do we really want, as Martha Beck so aptly puts it, our lives to become an exhausting sprint with no finish line, no real purpose, and no way to win?  I find that deeply scary. 

So I took another look at a reading I have by Angela Deutschmann’s  Insights From The Edge (Angela Deutschmann ), called “Fundamental Rest,” and it brought to mind again some powerful ideas.  These are the ones that stood out for me …

The only way you rest at a deep essential level is by allowing yourself - strange as it sounds - to put down your entire life and identity for a while. You do not have to do this for very long at a time to get very deep benefits, not at all. It’s much more about the permission to do so, and a regularity, than it is about the length of time.

So it’s not about sleep and it is not about having to take an hour each day to meditate.  It’s about regularly giving yourself the permission to have some empty time, even five minutes if that is all you have.

‘You cannot hope of yourself to have all the energy you need with which to embrace your joy if you are not resting properly. It’s just the same as a high performance athlete presuming that she can push and push and push herself and that her muscles will continue to perform magnificently. It does not ever work that way for any athlete, not any. And it is just the same with all human beings.’

We have seen with ourselves and others, if we keep up the pace of our stressful, busyness, at some level, the body gives, in one way or another – it has to.

Perhaps more important than any other, the benefit of Fundamental Rest is increased self-esteem: ‘Most of the other pursuits you do as a human being are to try and get from the world what you think you don’t have yet, or have enough of yet. However, the activity, or the non-activity, of simply being still, of fundamental rest, is a clear declaration to the universe that you think you are okay as you are, even for just a few moments.’

‘There is not a more powerful declaration of self love than sitting in nothingness.’  … ‘[Allowing yourself a few moments to be without]...giving or learning or improving or worshipping or listening or working or anything - is the strongest route to developing fundamental self love’.

Now how profound is that?!

So in light of all of this, I have decided that I would do just that - start a little ritual going, that every day when I have a cup of tea, I will just sit and drink it, doing nothing else but drink my tea and just be, no matter how rushed or harried I am feeling.

It took a great deal of courage to do that this morning as I have a to-do-list that is miles long, but I managed it! Crazy how taking ten minutes out to have a cup of tea is so hard?!  (The mind finds all kinds of excuses and reasons not to.) Yet it was so rewarding. I got to relax with my two old dogs that I rush past daily as I run in and out of the house and my naughty little cat that came and sat under my legs for some love.  I felt great.