I didn’t know that I didn’t know how to rest.
The more I move along whatever path this is (spiritual, healing, human, whatever)… The more I understand how it is merely the act of having a body that provides all substrate from which spiritual evolution occurs.
Intellectually, I’ve known this. It doesn’t sound that profound. But experiencing it time and time again, feels profound. Which tracks. Because knowing something intellectually usually ain’t shit. It can provide valuable conceptual framework and language to approximate experience, but it is only through experience itself do I ever really KNOW something. And when I really know something, only then can I really do anything about it, or call in more of it.
And as it turns out, rest is not something I knew. But because it is so simple a concept…because I have a work/life balance, and because my life is so much less chaotic than it used to be… I assumed I did.
In grad school, I realized I had an addiction to busy. Busy was my way of avoiding having what toiled beneath the surface to bubble up. Busy was my nervous system being stuck in a “flight” response.
So over the years, I’ve learned how to relax… But I realized, only very recently, I’ve never really rested. I can take a nap, or get a massage, and even sleep at night without the assistance of psychotropic medication (a miracle that never would’ve been possible 5 years ago)... But on a macro level, I don’t know what it's like to be at rest.
Because even when my body is horizontal, I am been deep at work in my healing. I’ve not taken a break in years. Since at least 2017, I have been continuously searching, constantly efforting to put puzzle pieces in place. Assuming the lack of wild success in business, the absence of a life partner, and some strained family relationships was evidence that I wasn’t healed enough, I feverishly plugged away. This, all being done so with a good dose of shame that I, for some reason, seemed to need to walk into walls a thousand times before entering the open doors that people around me seemed to find so easily.
And to be fair this relentless journey has been, in so many ways, wonderful, and effective. It really has been beautiful. And it has been really fucking hard. And I am tired. But I know it can be easy… But I realized that I don’t know how to do things easy. And admittedly, I kinda get off on being able to triumph over difficult things.
So I've started praying to learn to do things gently. And I saw that it was time to rest. But it occurred to me that I literally didn’t know how.
I had the notion that this was going to be a deep, “bottom-up” lesson. So in ceremony, in the presence of a loving, trusted guide, I entered plant medicine with the intention to learn rest.
At first, I was taken through a maze. My thoughts were so rapid, loud, and clanging, and I kept yelling at myself to lay into the music. “SURRENDER!!!!”. I knew that energy wasn’t helpful, but I was stuck in a loop of it. And I was rapidly taken to my childhood, and I heard all the yelling in my home. I felt how scared this made me. How the yelling at some point became internalized, becoming the voice and tone of my subconscious mind. And that despite years of working to calm my mind and shift things around subconsciously, deep in the oldest part of my brain, I’ve just been screaming at myself… since always. It was clear how this internal environment would be radically inconducive to rest.
I sobbed as I grieved this. And Katie held me, perfectly, breathing slowly, softly. And I was an infant. And as I cried so hard I nearly choked, so hard I nearly vomited, I felt myself asking my mother, “Is this ok? Are we Ok?”. Emotionally reaching, grasping. And I felt her, exhausted, stressed, resentful. I was able to zoom out and see her holding me, and felt so much grief for the weight she carried. And how much she loved me, how wanted I was. But the physical environment of her arms said “stress”, and I felt how as a result, I failed to learn to regulate my nervous system as an infant. I wanted my emotional needs met, but felt unsafe or wrong for asking. I didn’t trust that they could be. This is textbook anxious attachment.
I then traveled back further into utero. I felt how I inherited my mothers unresolved pain, and how she received her mothers. How it literally formed my physical being. I felt how my body has been SO stressed… ever since I had one. How I didn’t sleep for my first two years, and how I vomited so frequently as an infant that they scoped me to ensure my esophagus was attached to my stomach… I felt how my dysregulated nervous system was the root of my nervous bladder, early menarche and my lifelong struggle with acne. I felt how I’ve just been WEARING that stress for so many years... And how it was only natural that at some point it became so taxing that I wanted to discard my body. But Katies holding me in that state, her presence, her calm, translated into relearning attachment, and deep regulation. A new level of internal safety.
As I’ve sifted through this new level of understanding in my integration process, I realize how the anxious attachment that informed my inability to rest resulted in an inability to receive. I felt like I was a burden, unworthy of asking for anything. It didn’t feel safe. I recall the times in the last year in which gestures of generosity and gift giving towards me felt deeply stressful, even fearful in my body. I didn’t trust that what was offered was done so freely. I felt that love would be withheld if I were to accept.
I realize that not only was this relevant to humans, but that I had created an anxiously attached relationship to God. Because our attachment patterns are the working templates from which we operate in all dynamics, with both the concrete (literal people) and abstract concepts (career, success, God.) I was unconsciously operating under the pretense that I needed to be so healed that I was practically transfiguring physical form before I could be a match for my desires… When it turns out all I need to do is learn to receive.
Now, unfortunately, I’m not automatically absolved of my urge to shine a light in every dark corner of my subconscious. My skin is still blemished, and I still have impulses to anxiously attach. This work just shows us what direction to take. I find it opens a place in us that serves as a touchstone to cross reference our future experiences with. And now I know what rest feels like. I know what safely receiving, and deep, loving peace feels like in my body. So I am learning and mapping all the routes and avenues that lead me to that place.
I know how to do hard things. I’m good at them. And I’m glad.
But I’m ready for easy.
I'm stoked for gentle.
I’m ready for rest, and I’m open to receive.
