You can never, no matter how hard you try, be anyone else but yourself. Yet contemplate just for a moment how often content moves through your “mind-field,” which implies you should be different. Even slightly different. The field of our mind is tracking thoughts, beliefs, memories, comparisons, and the emotions which accompany them. Some seem automatic as if they are arising of their own volition; others seem like old, worn-out shoes you’ve been wearing for years. Regardless there is no out, no magic bullet that will get you away from all that occurred before, and has led you to be exactly as you are now. That is done. Yet each of you, in your own way, is interested in going beyond this conditioning, and the deep grooves of how you operate and interact with the world. And that is why I love and respect you because I’ve had the same interest for as long as I can remember.
Yet sometimes, our inner driver maxes out and what occurs is an absence of mental drive in the form of inertia, fatigue, and feeling flat, unmotivated or rudderless. Like our inner driver has driven off. What if, try as we might, we’ve got nothing left to give, despite a hefty to-do list screaming in our heads? Your mind may not like what I’m about to say, but it comes from decades of experience; I say ¨embrace your inability.¨ Please give it a full go, meaning cancel things that aren’t essential, wear the closest thing to jammies all day, nap, put your body at ease, eat comfort food, and watch, read or listen to something that soothes and calms you. In other words, embrace the fact you are troughed out and need rest. And here’s what I’ve come to see when we give ourselves deep unimpeded rest, we activate our built-in ability to balance and nourish ourselves. Watch any animal after they’ve played really hard, and you’ll see them rest deeply afterward. Same with babies and toddlers. Connected to their natural ability to balance their body eco-system, when their pendulum has swung deep into activity, they naturally swing back towards deep rest.
Practice playing around with how you can honor your inner pendulum’s need to counterbalance, i.e. be quiet, still, rest, unplug, step outside, etc. Granted we need to be smart and considerate in this. But get creative, as we’re all unique despite our common human natures. Notice the quality choices you make from pushing and forcing yourself, compared to those that come from clarity and nourishment. Track how a few self-honoring and balancing choices improve your relationships – even if there’s a bit of guilt involved. Investigate how a day of deep rest improves your body’s ability to accomplish physical activities the next day. Most of all, consider counterbalance as an intelligent, high-performance skill set- because it is. In the last nine months, I was able to end a clinical practice with integrity and care, clean out a family home of eighteen years, renovate three rooms in my Florida home, establish a Trust and create my Will, help my son into his new home, start and complete a home search three thousand miles away, enjoy a new personal relationship, rent out my Boca Raton home, and move into and set up my new Pt. Richmond home. All of this was accomplished by applying my personal techniques of surrendering entirely to being-unable-to-do-one-more-thing.
