If you're still reeling from the events of the last week (or the last year), rest assured: you're not alone. After such a stressful year, the events in the U.S. capitol pushed many over the limit.
Many of the folks I've been talking to are exhausted. The last year has been stressful unlike any other in most of our lifetimes—with impact upon impact. From the pandemic to continued racial injustice, from the ecological crisis to the economic to the political one, it's natural to feel worn out and down – right – bone – tired.
There's a deep need for healing and renewal.
These days “resilience” has become a buzz word. One hears a lot about self-care and developing inner resources. This is certainly important, yet in situations like these I've seen how such activities (like meditation or exercise) can become yet another subtle avoidance of how we feel, another thing to paper over and push beyond our limits.
Why Meditation Might Not Heal Your Tiredness
Modern society has an unhealthy, dysfunctional relationship with energy. It’s almost as if the fossil fuel that propels our world has colonized our hearts and minds. With a coffee shop on every corner and a barrage of messaging about how to maximize productivity, dominant western culture values profit, performance and appearance over pretty much everything else: real well-being, equity or human dignity, to name a just a few. The modern individual is praised and rewarded for pushing through exhaustion, over-riding natural limits, and sacrificing any shred of true presence or embodiment for the sake of meeting a deadline, increasing the bottom line, getting the grade.
In a post-truth, neoliberal political economy, “mindfulness” becomes a superficial antidote to the deeper malaise of a civilization whose core institutions and community bonds are disintegrating. Just slap some mindfulness onto that ragged, weary soul! De-stress, relax and be happy!
The craze for productivity, the addiction to busyness, can become so engrained that we grow numb even to sensing our own limits. The impulse to dominate and control nature, to extract resources, gets internalized and without realizing it one begins to relate to the body in the same way—the sensitivity and partnership of true relationship becomes drowned out and eclipsed by the pressure to be efficient.
It’s tragic how this patterning can take over our life, to the degree that otherwise healthy activities like contemplative practice, exercise, or learning a skill become the next set of New Years Resolutions in the never-ending race to upgrade our personality. It’s all too common: we unconsciously carry the extraction principle of modern life into our self-care routines, squeezing twenty minutes of meditation into a day that’s already too full.
The subtle receptivity of presence falls to the blunt tyranny of the to-do list.
Sadly, community organizers and activists, yearning for a different world, are often prey to the same illness. As Thomas Merton famously wrote decades ago:
“The rush and pressure of modern life are a form, perhaps the most common form, of innate violence. To allow oneself to be carried away by a multitude of conflicting concerns, to surrender to too many demands, to commit oneself to too many projects, to want to help everyone in everything is to succumb to violence. More than that, it is cooperation in violence. The frenzy of the activist neutralizes his work for peace. It destroys his inner capacity for peace. It destroys the fruitfulness of his own work because it kills the root of inner wisdom which makes life fruitful.” — Thomas Merton, Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander, 2009 p.81
After nearly a year of living with the fear, uncertainty and isolation of a global pandemic, after the searing pain of centuries of racial injustice on repeat display, after a bitter and tense national election culminating in a violent, deadline insurrection, it’s totally natural to feel tired.
When the exhaustion is this deep, when the stressors are ongoing, repeated and chronic, sometimes the wisest thing to do is...nothing.
What would it be like to allow yourself to stop and rest? To surrender, even for a little while, to the tiredness?
So I say to you: Lie down. Rest your body on the earth. Feel how you are literally held and supported by this vast, generous, breathing planet.
Every year, in winter, the earth teaches us to rest. She grows quiet and still, showing us the value of stopping, of allowing our lives to be fallow for a time.
And each year, in the spring, new life emerges from the soil.
If we are to heal this planet and our human society that is actively destroying it like a cancer, we must reclaim our capacity to rest. We must begin to learn again how to sense our limits. We must call forth the courage to cut against the grain, to finally say, “No,” and honor our limits. My Jewish ancestors understood the importance of stopping and ritualized this deep need for sacred rest in the Sabbath.
For there is no action without rest, no healing or renewal without stopping. When I am tired beyond words, I try to allow myself to surrender to that feeling. Sometimes it feels as if I'll never get up again, that if I let go the energy will never return.
Yet without fail, when I open my heart to the heavy weight of exhaustion, there is a tenderness that comes to hold it all. It seeps to the surface like ground water welling up, bringing a gentle, steady love to hold the weariness and anger, the hurt and the grief.
This tenderness is a different order of energy than the unchecked, reflexive will to do, the drive to accomplish that dominates the modern economy. It is a sustainable energy that rises from deep within, a renewable resource that comes not from the will but from the source of our vitality: connection to truth.
Our world is calling for healing and change. It needs people who can listen, people who can stand up and articulate—with courage and love—the vision of a society rooted in dignity, healing and opportunity for all. Yet we cannot do this work without taking care of ourselves.
So, I offer this invitation to each of us: take time to rest. Unplug. Do nothing. Let the earth hold you with tenderness for as long as you need.
And if the realities life—of working, raising children, caring for an ill family member, and untold other responsibilities—means that you have little time to rest, then I urge you: become a connoisseur of the small moments in between things.
Stepping out of your door feel the morning air on your face and relish the freshness of being alive. Waiting in line close your eyes and rest with the simplicity of breathing. When you come home at the end of a long day, allow yourself to sit down for even two minutes and rest. Put everything down. There is a world of stillness and healing available in those two minutes of deep rest.
And then, when you rise, let your heart and body guide you with purpose to reach out and do what you can to help.