Is it possible that the part of you that is watching your feelings is not actually feeling your feelings?
Amidst the hurly-burly, chaotic, exhausting playing out of your emotions, is it possible that there is part of you – the deepest, most essential aspect of your being – that is always there just watching? Is it possible that regardless of what it is watching, this aspect of your being is always OK? It is always at peace? It is always just. . . being?
Rest requires us to give up any ideas about control: controlling our experiences, controlling our feelings and controlling how we rest. Rest is fundamentally effortless and detached from experience. Rest is, therefore, a means to connect with this always-at-ease awareness that is the essence of your existence – perhaps just to glimpse, perhaps to loiter. Ultimately, rest both connects you with this ease and reminds you that it is there, that at your very depths, you are always restfully being.
Rest is what happens when everything else stops
We might at times want to call this state of watchful, restful, full-yet-empty being peace (even though it resides beyond peace. . .). We’re not talking about a spiritual peace, or even a physical peace, but more a sense of absolute OK-ness – of absolute completeness – that very often comes out of nowhere and without us having done anything to prompt it. Sometimes, we don’t realise it’s been there until it’s gone.
When this quality of peace becomes present in our experience it feels as though we have connected with something deep – something knowing – within ourselves, while at the same time we have a sense of being connected with everything we had thought was outside of ourselves. We, for just moments, become aware of our own smallness yet somehow feel greater for the realisation.
This quality of peace requires absolutely nothing for you to connect with it: and this is the problem. We very rarely do nothing. In fact, nothing is not something you can do.
That said, regardless of your circumstances, you will have experienced this quality of peace many times in your life already, however fleetingly, and without exception these will have all been times when you stopped trying to do anything (including trying to bring about a sense of peace). You will have been resting – that is, you will have separated yourself from the desire to do, have, think or feel anything at all.
Perhaps you woke up this morning and for those first few seconds were aware of a sense of ease and spaciousness before your brain kicked in and started barking orders at you or telling you stories about how you were going to feel for the remainder of the day. Or perhaps you recently undertook a task that consumed your full attention so much so that all your mind-chatter cleared out the way until it felt as if ‘you’, in effect, was gone. Perhaps you can recall having been to a music concert and suddenly feeling as though you and the musicians and the music were one; as though everyone in the venue had merged into the same poignant, unified experience. Or perhaps last weekend you took a walk in nature and, although for much of the time you were preoccupied with to-dos and work quandaries, there was also that blissful moment when you gazed out to take in the view and for just a few seconds became aware of a magnitude of quiet. Or perhaps you most recently found peace in that first mouthful of ice cream – not because it satisfied your taste buds but because, just for an instant, everything else stopped.
ASK YOURSELF
Can you recall a time, however recent or long ago, when you were hit by a sudden feeling of being both completely present and entirely connected to the people and experiences around you? If that’s too strong, perhaps think back to a moment when you suddenly noticed a stillness — an OK-ness — without there being any particular reason why.
In all these examples, rest (stillness, silence. . . a harmonious no-thing) emerged only when everything else had faded away. That feeling of completeness – of everything being OK exactly as it is right now – was not brought into the experience but rather revealed itself only once everything else was gone. This quality of peace, it seems, is the only remaining constant when all other layers of our experience are removed. This is a wonderful thing to know. It is always present within us, even when we are experiencing great suffering. But it is also deeply frustrating, since we are unlikely to feel its presence if we are distracted by any other aspect of our experience.
Why we must stop trying to make ourselves restful
Rest enables us to connect more readily with the constant sense of OK-ness that is the backdrop of all experience, but we cannot enter rest with any conditions. As soon as we apply goals to rest, we turn it into a task, and it is no longer rest. For this reason, we must let go of any preconceived ideas we have about what rest is and what it should look like.
You have an opportunity here to surrender to the freedom that comes from not having to know how any of this works. You do not need to be an expert in meditation or an experienced yogi to ‘do’ anything we are sharing in this book – the point is: you need to do nothing.
And perhaps the greatest challenge of all will be to accept that this journey is not about helping yourself but about coming to the realisation that in spite of everything – all the suffering, all the stress, all the chaos, all the excitement, disappointments celebrations and grief – you exist from a place of constant, unshakable wholeness. There is part of you that doesn’t need any help at all, ever.
— If you’d only stop looking, you’d see there is something fundamentally right with you.
So, here we have yet another apparent contradiction: we want to emphasise that this is not a self-help book in its traditional form, yet we hope that this book will help you to see that part of you that needs no help. It is not a practical guide to positive thinking, a step-by-step route to achieving happiness, a collection of motivational mantras, a roadmap to realising your potential. But this is a self-help book in that it very much requires you to take on the idea that you are your best helper, and then see that it’s not so much help that you need, but awareness, and then ultimately. . . that you are awareness.
But that’s for you to find out, perhaps at the end of this journey.
The concept of helping yourself, or improving yourself, or bettering yourself (however you wish to label such a task) suggests you are somehow lacking. That you just need to do X, Y and Z, and bingo! New you. Whether that’s a thinner, less anxious, better focused, more positive, less stress-heady version of yourself, most self-help books start with the assertion that you are not already OK. We, however, are suggesting that you are already OK, and that it might be that the very notion that you must do something to help you feel OK that is stopping you from feeling OK.
Again, we urge you to stop. Stop trying to help yourself. Or at the very least, take a rest from it.
ASK YOURSELF…
Do you ‘do’ anything in an attempt to feel more rested? Can you see any contraction in what you are doing? What leaves you feeling most rested?
Enquiry 2:
Why do you want to rest?
We so often fixate on what we want, and yet we so rarely ask ourselves why.
You might see how your answers are in conflict with the very nature of rest (and you might not).
Who’s going to benefit from this rest? How? Does it matter if no one benefits? What is the point?
Is it OK to do something that is completely pointless?
Can anything be truly pointless?
There are endless paradoxes around the subject of rest. We can’t do it, but we have to do it. We can’t make ourselves do it, but it must be done. We cannot have the intention of it doing anything for us, but it will do everything for us. We cannot think our way into it, but by thinking about it when we are not doing it, we will become better at not-thinking our way into it.