Rest and Integration
Rest is important for many reasons outside of maintaining functionality in our bodies. We do in fact need rest in order to operate these vessels, and we tend to find ways to limit our rest as much as possible. Some of us have figured out that we can get by with less sleep at night, and we continue to stay up late to maximize our work and recreation time. Staying up late to enjoy things we don’t have time for during the day seems like a great idea until our sleep debt comes to collect and we find ourselves feeling exhausted and behind on taking care of ourselves. It is essential to cultivate healthy boundaries around our work hours so that we can leave enough time for rest, self-care, and recreation that doesn’t encroach on our sleep time. When we find a way to balance our time, that leads us to become more emotionally regulated, which helps to bring an ease of flow into our daily life experience.
If you schedule your entire life, but you forget to budget time for rest and integration, you might find that you need a long vacation to recover and catch up on your peace and quiet. If you build these into your daily practice, you’ll find that you have the ability to cultivate a life that you don’t need to escape. You deserve to find time to feel good every day instead of focusing on enjoyment for a couple weeks out of the year. At that point, you’ll find that your vacation time can act as a true replenishment for your spirit rather than a momentary step away from the grind to catch your breath. Rest outside of sleeping at night is essential for the spiritual journey because that time allows us to integrate our shadow work and healing experiences.
When we are in the habit of healing ourselves, we often come across cycles that need to be broken and patterns that are no longer serving us. When a pattern first comes into our awareness, we are simply recognizing it and noticing that it exists. The next step is to begin to decipher this pattern with our logical mind, and we spend some time intellectualizing it and developing a deeper understanding of ourselves and how we relate to the pattern. The final stage of healing is the integration phase where we allow our bodies to process this information fully and let go of any energetic blocks or attachments that we have to this pattern that we are releasing. In order to close a cycle, we have to move through these three stages of healing. Rest is the key ingredient for the integration phase because our bodies need time to digest this information and let go of everything that needs to leave.
Our body can’t do this tedious task while we’re up and around actively working and learning new things. If we tend to walk away from the healing process early by skipping the rest phase, we can accumulate a backlog of information that our mind has processed, but our body has not. This is why taking a break is so helpful to cultivate forward momentum. We must allow our bodies to catch up with our minds so that we can ground the energetic state that we’re trying to achieve in the physical world. Rest also provides time for us to regulate the nervous system, which is essential in calling in opportunities for progress in our lives. Everything is connected to rest because resting properly gives us the energy to live our lives to the fullest and to reach our highest potential.
Chasing your dreams and grinding endlessly leaves you feeling empty and unfulfilled, which ultimately leads to burnout and system failure. We must find a way to cultivate balance and allow life to unfold before us each day. We must trust that our strong foundations will hold us long enough to catch up on long awaited rest, which will propel us toward our future goals. We must slow down long enough to allow our blessings to catch up with us, and for our bodies to catch up with the work we’ve been doing. Rest gives us the opportunity to keep going in a way that working tirelessly can’t provide. Rest opens the door to allowing, which can bring in miracles that chasing can only dream about.