Being fully rested and well slept is like waking up in a bed full of hope.
A wealthy feeling, soul-cup refilled, a cauldron of deep sleep in our bones as if the sea herself has filled our cells overnight with stories.
A good nights sleep, delicious nap or any other Being practice is one of the most profound, accessible and simple ways to restore our mood and physical well being. But there are often creatures in the seas of our subconscious wrecking this delicious harmony of body, mind and spirit integrated.
A good night's sleep doesn't cost a thing...except time.
And there's the fissure that leads down several rabbit holes right there: culture, economics, circadian living, ancestral 'rest-trauma' and the pressures held tight in our collectively porous nervous systems.
“There are twelve hours in the day, and above fifty in the night.”
— Marie de Rabutin-Chantal
Many an article has been written on the ill advised yet highly addictive habit of watching blue light on various screens late at night.
We try to turn off the smart phone at a sensible time so it doesn’t crank up our anxious brains with world news or some inexplicable necessity to watch a lion bonding with a duckling on youtube, and instead find ourselves at midnight feeling wired but tired.
However, beneath the addictive tech there's often deeper threads of resistance to resting, three of which I will outline as major preventatives to the nourishing self care act of fully letting go.
And a side note: whereas we often think of resistance as something inside of us that stops us doing something, there's also a kind that wrecks our ability to truly let go and Be.
"I think the entire culture has pushed and switched, tricked and bamboozled us in a way that we think something that’s a divine right as a human right is now some luxury, some privilege."
Tricia Hersey, Founder of The Nap Ministry
Resistance is like a ghost that creeps around, poking us when we're vulnerable and yet doesn’t want to be seen.
Every time we listen to our bodies natural yearning for rest it can haunt us with the 'no's' and 'not good enough's' that glide beneath our skin.
What the field of epigenetics is making apparent through the 'biology of belief' is how traumas are continuing through family DNA lines and that the deep fear of what will happen to us if we stop to rest - for resting requires safety, vulnerability and receptivity - can manifest as a pattern of 'somehow' just not going to bed at a certain healthy time.
I remember vividly during a client session sensing a deep terror in them around going to bed before 11 pm. This person's family had a history of domestic violence and alcoholism and until very recently in the UK pub closing time was always 11 o'clock.
For those families, often including small children, that time of night was when tyranny arrived home. The ability to rest and let go before then - if ever - felt impossible.
Similarly, if we look at the crucial mammalian wiring of the nervous system, when an individual is oppressed through coercion or capture - and this can be both interpersonal and on the macro political level - the natural instincts to fight or flee become suppressed down into a protective freeze response.
This can often be masked or overridden through time by a pushing kind of functional busyness, particularly when living in poverty, that exhausts the body's life force, or a deep freeze state of fatigue, hypervigilant anxiety and often insomnia.
"When trauma has shaped you, try not to confuse who you had to become with who you can be."
Dr Thema Bryant Davis
What can help us heal our relationship to rest is to understand the crucial sequencing of our nervous system and to choose practices and - a currently unfashionable - slower way of living that allows the nervous system to heal out of functional freeze (read more on my blog here).
For the body to truly rest into the healthy para sympathetic nervous system state the underlying trapped response of functional freeze and sympathetic fight charge needs to be slowly allowed up and released.
When we try and sleep on top of this suppressed response we are actually mirroring the sticky plaster approach of 'biohacking' sleep.
We are approaching the problem with the level of consciousness that created it - acting as if the body cannot escape the culture and must fawn and adapt to it - and this brings me to the third aspect of resistance - our systems and very concepts of time.
Often we approach the hours before bed as a counting bean of value - did I accumulate the correct amount during the day, did I justify my existence even!
This underlying collective trauma of feeling not good enough in turn feeds into a system that financially recognises and values certain qualities. It often comes out to stalk us when we want to rest.
Doing busy during the day keeps the fear at bay so to speak. Evenings are the energetic front line.
A recommended practice I often use to tease out the deeper emotions beneath sleep-fear and rest-trauma is Emotional Freedom Technique (termed EFT or Tapping).
This allows you to feel, accept and move through this layer of resistance that blocks resting and to understand your self worth doesn't automatically come from doing and achieving.
When we have found the balance between yin and yang, receptive and directive - a radical act in the capitalist world where justifying our existence with hustle and perpetual doing has been coercively sown deep into our beliefs and self esteem patterning - we can develop a harmonious and fluid relationship with our own resting needs.
“A ruffled mind makes a restless pillow.”
— Charlotte Brontë
Fear of truly resting has been an ongoing thread in my own healing journey and really took centre stage when I began working solely as a self employed energy healer.
This kind of intuitive work - ocean deep and sky high - doesn't fit any definition of linear 9-5 production.
Deep periods of being are required as buffer zones around the practice of being deeply present to the subtle levels of energy in others.
And like a field that needed to go fallow I found myself needing more rest because...well if I didn't my psychic abilities couldn't function!
So through economic and wellness necessity I was led into a deeper psychological encounter with my ancestral rest-trauma and of all the ways my nervous system had lived in functional freeze to cope.
The more we disentangle our self esteem from action oriented verbs of doing and recover our own healthy relationship with sympathetic dynamic energy - not throwing the masculine baby out with the bath water of ancestral trauma but instead healing it - the freer we become.
As Tricia Hersey states 'rest is resistance'.
The empowering place for me was seeing how there’s a mermaid part of my soul that lives in another dimension when I’m asleep.
She is the muse for my creativity and feeding my psyche in ways that my own modern culture often has no language for.
Recovering rest was in fact recovering self care and a radical - somatic and embodied - acceptance.
May you heal and rest well x
References: https://prismreports.org/2020/09/03/qa-nap-ministrys-tricia-hersey-talks-rest-and-racial-justice
Photo by Oliver Sjöström on Unsplash