Give It a Rest

Meditation: Give It a Rest
Guest Post by Margaret Fletcher

(Bill's note: Margaret is a long-time friend of mine who is an ace at getting massive amounts of work done in the most efficient and effective ways I've ever seen. She is a true expert in her field and you would be well-served to spend some time at her site studying her methods.)

My friend Bill asked me to put some ideas together for all of you in his community, from the perspective of my way of life. I’m a meditation teacher. Nice to meet you!

Knowing very little about you all, I’ve spent some time contemplating what I might be able to offer that would be of use to you. I imagine a population of people who have high discipline and focus on a specific goal, that of optimizing the physical body.

My own exploration intercepts quite well with that, but I come at things from a different angle. What I’m interested in is optimizing life. That may sound like a ridiculously general goal, and I sense that it is unusually general. Nevertheless, it’s my highest value, it covers everything I do, and I spend the same amount of attention and effort to achieve this goal that I imagine some of you do. And part of this effort, it is very clear to me, must be to engage intimately with the physical body in order to determine how to live optimally in this vehicle we travel around in. So with that said, I think I actually could say a few useful things.

To start, meditation practice is about getting very clear about what’s happening. When you can do this well, you can then take the wisest action available in a given situation. Really knowing what’s happening can include knowing better the conditions around you, and also knowing your own reactions to those conditions, knowing how your body and gut and mind respond and react to various stimuli. Knowing these things, and recognizing what works and what really doesn’t, this is the key to a meditation practice that’s helping you be the person you want to be.

You are surely an expert at this kind of knowing in some places in your life. For example, you may know exactly what happens to a particular muscle when you perform a particular exercise X times per day, and also know what happens when you drop that exercise.  You have perhaps been through the cycle of waxing and waning discipline, and seen what that does to achieving what you’re looking for in your body-building practice. What you may not know about are the subtle and not-so-subtle things that are interfering or supporting your practice. If you could sort out all the bits that interfere and avoid those, and identify all the bits that support and do more of those, can you consider the places you could take your practice and yourself?

Meditation practice can open the field of your disciplined effort to include all aspects of your being. Bill tells me that the three pillars of practice for body optimization are diet, exercise and recovery. The practices of meditation can play an important role in each of these areas. Let’s look at recovery this time. Recovery happens when you give everything a well-deserved rest, yes?

Americans are chronically under-rested. I say this as an expert from the field of meditation. Whenever I am with people who are undertaking a prolonged period of meditation, one of the phenomena people most often report about is falling asleep during meditation. And it doesn’t matter whether “prolonged” is 20 minutes for a beginning meditator, or 5 days for someone first undertaking a silent retreat. People are tired. This comes as a big surprise to such people, but it comes as no surprise to me. Our culture does not value high quality rest time. Ask yourself the following questions, and see how many you can honestly say yes to:

• Do you know to take regular breaks from focused work, and do you actually take them?
• Do you awaken in the morning spontaneously, rather than by an alarm dragging you from sleep?
• Do you avoid multi-tasking and distracting yourself during traditionally restful activities, such as enjoying a meal or conversation with friends?
• When you relax your mind and body, can you fully let go of mental activity and physical tension?

I’m betting you had at least a couple of “no’s” in there.

Most people don’t actually know how to rest properly and often. Instead, we generally go full-tilt all day, cramming in too many activities, over-working, eating at our desks, even efforting hard to “have fun” during off-time. Then at the end of all that we fall into bed, and continue to sleep in the same break-neck way we’ve spent the rest of our day.

This may feel like it’s well known to you. Sure, I know, I should rest more, and get better quality rest. Everybody knows that. What’s that got to do with meditation?

Remember, meditation is to get really clear about what’s happening, so clear in fact that to do anything other than take the best possible care of yourself becomes impossible. So, for the rest element, when you start to meditate, you become aware and then more aware and eventually deeply aware of whether you’re rested or not, when you’re rested and when not, what feels restful and what feels harmful to restfulness. You become an expert at your own states of restfulness, or not, and you subsequently and naturally become an expert at resting.

This does not mean you become lazy, by the way. If you become expert at resting, you become an equal expert at effective, high-energy action when that’s called for. See how this works?

There’s lots more I could say about this topic. I could give you a list of things I do for myself now that I am attuned to my own energy levels throughout the day, and from day to day. But I don’t want to turn this into a to-do list of actions from my own particular circumstances. Each of us has different things that feel restful versus energy-draining. You need to find out what yours are, and then act on them. This is not exactly news to you. But if you haven’t found the means to actually act on this knowledge, maybe it’s only speculation or assumption rather than knowledge that you’re working from.

Or I could tell you about the studies that have shown a marked increase in meditators’ versus non-meditators’ REM sleep. That’s the kind of sleep that cultivates the best kind of healing and restoration, the kind that bodybuilders need for that all-important recovery pillar. Again, interesting facts, but without direct experience of this it’s meaningless.

In my book, the only way to get the truth about all of this is to look deeply into your own experience. And the way to do that properly is to take up a highly disciplined, focused study. I call that meditation.

Margaret is a business owner, mother, mindfulness teacher and meditation floozy. Her interest is in awakening to the truth of what you are, whether that be through profoundest stillness or in the middle of peeling potatoes. You can find her writings about awakening to the all-out, full-blast, top-to-bottom richness of life at her blog, Stumbling Awake.