Our lack of rest and reflection is not just a personal affliction, but it colors the way we build and sustain community, it dictates the way we respond to suffering, and it shapes the way in which we seek peace and healing in our world.
In March 2020, I was inspired to read a book called "Sabbath, Finding Rest, Renewal, and Delight In Our Busy Lives" by Wayne Muller. It was my third time reading the book, but I had somehow missed the life-changing message it carried in my previous two attempts. After my third reading, I got it, and I was transformed. There is no turning back.
All life requires a rhythm of rest. Our hearts rest after each life-giving beat. Our lungs rest between the inhale and the exhale. I had lost the essential rhythm of Sabbath. Due to my overwhelming desire to succeed and meet the enormous expectations I placed on my life, I lost the rhythm between work and rest. I did not know, I was clueless as to what Sabbath (rest) was all about.
I believed all the work I did was required not only to accomplish the tasks assigned but also to receive blessings and to please God. This belief went on for over 25 years until the constant exhaustion led me to a life-saving realization. For years, I knew something was not right, but I could not put my finger on it. My life was busy all the time. I found no peace and no pleasure in enjoying my life. I was searching for an understanding and clarity. Why was it okay for me to be so busy all the time?
I later realized that in my drive for success, notoriety, and security, I was seduced by the promise of more. More money, more recognition, more love, more satisfaction, more influence, more possessions… The list never ended. Living the "successful" life had become a violent enterprise. It caused me to go to war with my body by pushing it beyond its limits.
I also went to war with my husband of 25+ years because I did not make time to spend with him. My whole experience of being alive culminated in one enormous obligation. I did not know how to STOP. The busier I was, the more important I seemed to myself and others, at least in my anxious mind.
My life as I knew it completely changed when I learned the life-saving principle of the Sabbath. The word Sabbath referred only to the last day of the week to some, but I discovered it is a revolutionary tool for cultivating those precious human qualities that grow only in time.
As busyness became a kind of violence for me, I leaned deep into Sabbath. I found Sabbath time (rest) was an effortlessly nourishing time that allowed me to invite healing for this violence I was living in. For me to be without rest, I responded from a survival mode where everything I met assumed a terrifying prominence. I reacted with sloppy desperation because of exhaustion.
Setting aside sacred time to rest created an internal place for me so, if I got lost, I could find my way back to my center. Remembering to rest means remembering everything I have received is a blessing. It also means remembering to delight in my life and the fruits of my labor, stop, take deep breaths, and offer thanks for the wonders of rest.
What I gathered from Muller is remembering Sabbath (to rest). It is not a simple lifestyle suggestion for one day but a life-saving principle found in most of the world's spiritual and religious traditions. Sabbath honors the necessary wisdom of dormancy. A lack of dormancy produces confusion and erosion in the life force. According to Muller, we all must have a period in which we lie dormant to refresh and restore our souls.
I noticed in my rest, I became available to the insight and blessings of deep mindfulness that arose only in stillness and time. When I acted from a place of deeper breath, I was more capable of cultivating what the Buddhists would call right understanding, right action, and right effort. In this unstable world, if you do not rest or surrender in some kind of Sabbath, how can you find your way?
For this reason is why I created For the REST of Your Life, my signature online coaching program to teach women of faith who, like me, have forgotten the necessity of the Sabbath. Women who have forgotten to take time for a sacred rest. Sacred rest is time off the wheel and off the grind. Sacred rest is more than the absence of work. It is a time to let God (or your higher power) care for things while you drink from the fountain of rest and delight.
It is the presence of something that arises when you consecrate a period of time to listen to what is most deeply beautiful, nourishing, or true. I am flattered to help consistently-busy women of faith to create a time to honor the quiet forces of grace and spirit that sustain and heal them. When you find rest, you find that balance point at which, having rested, you can do your work with greater ease and joy while bringing peace, healing, and delight to all your endeavors.