Busy doing nothing ...

How often do you set aside time to rest? To simply lie down, be still and do nothing at all?

Do you value rest? Or do you dismiss it as a waste of precious time when you could be doing something/ going somewhere/meeting someone/achieving something/crossing another thing off your ‘to do’ list?

Or maybe you tell yourself there aren’t enough hours in the day as it is and you don’t have time to stop and do absolutely nothing?

As my Restorative Yoga teacher, Judith Hanson Lasater, likes to remind us, time is the most democratic of resources. We all have the same amount of time. We are all given 24 hours each day. How you choose to spend that time is up to you.

Life has always been stressful. But many of us now live in a chronically stressed state. Health concerns (exacerbated by the ongoing global pandemic), workplace demands, financial worries, family responsibilities and unrelenting over-stimulation can leave us feeling permanently frazzled and exhausted. Yet we have become conditioned to view rest as a luxury rather than a necessity.

Rest is essential. When we are well rested, our stress hormone levels drop, our heart rate, breathing rate and brain waves slow down, our blood pressure is lowered, we tend to sleep better, our digestion often improves, our body finds its own homeostasis again.

When we are well rested, we tend to be nicer individuals. Think about it. When we feel ‘stressed out’, we rarely stop to lend others a hand/allow others to jump the queue ahead of us/let the other motorist out in front of us/listen to others patiently/give freely of our time to others.

We all have time to rest.

So why not challenge yourself to make rest a priority from now on? Try taking 20 minutes out of each day to simply lie down in Savasana and relax. I promise, you won’t regret it!

Over the next few weeks, I’ll be sharing tips on how you can find greater comfort in Savasana to help you rest more easily.