Is rest the resistance of our times?

This is the second of a two-part mini series on rest, and how to make our living in the world more sustainable personally and ecologically.

This week millions of us living in northern England were plunged back into lockdown.

I live in Sheffield which, at the moment, is only in two-tier lockdown but the prospect of full lockdown always looms, and for some that reality has already arrived.

I think we’d all agree that whatever novelty there might have been from the first lockdown has most certainly worn off. Especially as we know we have a long old winter ahead of us too, with shorter and colder days and all the challenges that can bring mentally and physically.

The winter of 2020 is looking like a daunting prospect and even our ever-jolly Prime Minister has warned that there are ‘tough times ahead.’

But winter is, if you like, nature’s rest time. Every year her activity is reduced to the bare minimum as the ground digests the summer’s fallen bounty, and the sun retreats to other lands.

This is the rhythm of the world we live in, though we often try to resist it.

And I wonder if we might learn something from that pattern which can help us over the months ahead?

About how rest renews and re-orientates us, and why that might be one of the greatest acts of resistance to climate breakdown that we can take.

The Opposite of Rest

I’m the kind of person that thrives off the thrill of busyness. I love the adrenaline of it, the feeling of importance, of going to bed knowing I’ve made ‘the best possible use of my day.’

At least, that was until something within me began to shift a little while ago.

A burnout that was creeping up on me like a clock constantly ticking away, counting down to the moment I knew I couldn’t run on empty any longer.

I had the luxury of buying myself some extra time with a couple of holidays abroad. They required flying, which I wasn’t comfortable with but I buried that discomfort as part of my coping strategy.

And it was on one of those trips, as I wrote about in my last blog On… Rest #1, that I finally faced what my life had been saying to me for a while; it was time to stop.

I knew because my body was starting to communicate with me. Warning signs had come in the form of strange aches and pains, loss of sleep, colds, infections… and there was no longer the same joy in the work that I once willingly poured myself into.

I noticed myself becoming more cynical and resentful. And of course, I was tired.

All. The. Time.

So over the Christmas break I read a book on burnout that had been recommended to me by a mentor and which had the most curious title. It was called, ‘The Joy of Burnout’ (emphasis mine).

And I wondered, how on earth could there be any joy in feeling this awful?

There is Joy in Burnout

The book’s author, Dr. Dina Glouberman, takes an incredibly meaningful approach to the experience of burnout.

For Glouberman burnout is what happens when we develop a way of operating in the world that was probably once very helpful but which no longer serves us. We hit a wall because we have been too reluctant to change as to do so involves letting go of what we know and trying a new way of being in the world.

She writes that those who have experienced burnout ‘faced a change in which the heart went out of our situation, yet we continued onwards, driven by fear, ignoring the warning signals and shutting off from the truth.’ (p.148)

According to Glouberman, this is why some people living in incredibly difficult circumstances where their lives are on the line can find the resources to keep going where someone in a relatively comfortable, if totally draining, job can wake up one day and find that they literally cannot get themselves out of bed.

When our heart is no longer in something, when deep down we know there has to be an alternative, there’s only so long we can force the body to keep on going.

But for Glouberman, burnout is not some great failing. It is instead a threshold moment where an outdated way of doing things dies away, and the new is opening before us, even if we cannot see it yet.

And she urges us to take this view because embracing what the signs of burnout might be trying to communicate, at any stage along the burnout continuum, reduces the damage of the fall out that waits for us regardless.

That’s not to say that burnout is always avoidable, nor that the responsibility for burnout always rests on the shoulders of the one who experiences it.

In fact, Glouberman’s perspective on burnout got me thinking for the first time about the wider system we are all a part of which seems to be experiencing a kind of unraveling that has swept many of us along with it in its course.

And last year I began to think about climate breakdown as a kind of global burnout for the first time also.

The climate emergency is a sign that our current way of life, which has in many ways served many well, now needs some serious readjustment. There are some things we need to let go of as part of our evolution as a species, and not just because they’re bad for the planet but because they’re fundamentally out of alignment with our flourishing as human beings.

Just as I had been scared to admit to myself that the reality of being a charity Director didn’t fit with how I’d imagined it would be, so too have we and our leaders been afraid to admit that modern life is not on track to create the setting for human flourishing we had originally envisioned.

And we can keep plowing on, or we can read the writing on the wall whilst there’s still time.

A World in Burnout

Just as during burnout I was experiencing all sorts of strange symptoms as my body tried to communicate with me, so too are we seeing similar aches and pains of a planet groaning under the stresses of our modern way of life.

Increasingly strange, unpredictable and dangerous weather patterns, democratic collapse, rising mental ill-health and addiction, growing inequality, and now the pandemic… many of us are increasingly concerned that there is something deeply wrong, but we don’t know how to make it right.

Which is where the experience of recovering from personal burnout might have something to teach us about recovering from global burnout.

Could the reason so many of us are feeling tired and frayed be because the world as a whole is experiencing a kind of burnout with modern day life? — *Could the reason so many of us are feeling tired and frayed be*
*because the world as a whole is experiencing a kind of burnout with modern day life?*

The treatment that Glouberman advises as the most powerful means of finding our way out of burnout, is in complete surrender to the rest our minds and bodies desperately need.

She writes, ‘burnout has to do with our unwillingness to surrender- to our bodies, hearts, and souls and to reality itself. Healing begins at the moment we surrender.’ (p. 166)

Burnout is what happens when we disconnect from ourselves and the world around us because we have been too afraid of what we might hear if we listen, and the changes that might be required of us. And because this leaves us so out of touch with ourselves, that is often why recovering from burnout involves a great deal of just doing nothing.

Of resting and waiting, in order to allow what needs to emerge to find its way through, so that something new can be born.

This was the kind of rest, amidst the crisis, that many people noticed when we entered lockdown the first time. Suddenly, it was as though the planet could breathe again, and a sense that some great moment of re-evaluation might have been taking place.

The Nap Ministry

A couple of weeks ago, in my post On… Diversity, I wrote about the wealth of wisdom with regards to finding resilience in an unsafe world that can be learned from communities that have experienced persecution.

One such example of that wisdom can be found in an American-based movement which is entirely dedicated simply to the act of napping.

The Nap Ministry is founded by the black performance artist, theologian, and activist, Tricia Hersey and advocates for the power of rest as a means of resisting the relentless pushing of our modern day existence.

The movement consciously links the act of napping with the art of being, listening, and connecting, as well as other social movements such as Black Lives Matter and anti-capitalism, as a means of moving from a productivity-based society, to a fairer, more equal, and humane society.

The Nap Ministry is a kind of activism that genuinely turns everything on its head because it’s not about doing more and getting somewhere. It’s about living personally what we would want to see globally, and using what is already available to us- such as a lie down- to renew ourselves for the challenges of living in the world right now.

If you’re interested in discovering more about the healing power of naps and use social media you can join The Nap Ministry on Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook for regular encouragement to resist the addiction of busyness and embrace the liberation that comes from allowing ourselves to listen to the needs of our bodies.

Rest as Resistance

Genuine rest is an act of resistance because it’s one of the hardest things to do, especially when there’s somewhere we’re trying to get to (like a 2030 carbon emissions deadline).

I say genuine rest because self-care is something that is becoming increasingly commercialised.

For example, it didn’t take long after starting to do more research on self-care for Facebook to start advertising a whole variety of new products to me such as online self-care coaching courses, a whole plethora of yoga outfits, mats and props, and even a gadget that could measure my brain waves to help improve meditation practice!

And more than once I have succumbed and at least had a look at the promises of those advertisements. In fact, next week I’ll be sharing my review of an online course I recently discovered through Facebook advertising…

It’s not that they are bad things in themselves, but the problem with the commercialisation of self-care means that nothing fundamentally changes at all.

It is not the kind of reorientation that the failings of modern day life requires of us, but rather a tweaking to the business as usual model.

We still see ourselves as consumers, looking for something outside of ourselves to find fulfillment or the solution to our problems, instead of knowing that we are an inherently regenerative species, capable of finding solutions if we can but create the space for them to emerge.

As I wrote about in my post On… Money #2, this is dangerous because we are here to do so much more than consume, and if we cannot find new ways of relating to the material world we will soon find that it can no longer support us in what we strive for.

So a nap is an especially powerful form of rest because it’s so beautifully simple in its refusal to have any other benefits than simply being something that nourishes us. A nap really is a form of resistance.

The Objective of Rest

The beauty of authentic rest is that it allows us to do the waiting that Glouberman advises in our recovery from burnout.

So the real ‘objective’ of resting, if that isn’t an oxymoron, is simply to connect, and in doing so tune into our own inner power.

And that’s something we desperately need because, whilst we might be clearer than ever about what needs to happen scientifically to halt climate change, we remain very much in the dark about how we actually mobilise ourselves to have the motivation and political will to make those changes.

So each of us has a part to play in figuring out how we can enable our friends and families, communities, and our governments to rise to this challenge.

Every conversation we have, and every lifestyle choice we make, is an opportunity to experiment with what works and doesn’t work in creating this new way of being in the world.

And we’ll need to cultivate our lives in a way so that the busyness of it all doesn’t get in the way of enabling us to listen deeply to what we will need to hold on to and what we will need to let go of.

Time to Turn Inwards

I don’t know what more resting and waiting would look like for you in your life.

Maybe it will be a nap, or some scatterfocus time as I wrote about in On.. Rest #1, or perhaps a meditation or more time outdoors, or perhaps some time out of work. It doesn’t really matter because what is most important is that you feel able to listen to your own intuition.

The world needs as many of us as possible connected deeply to the parts of ourselves that are wise, creative, and courageous. And it’s difficult to do that when we’re exhausted.

So as we enter this winter lockdown period I hope that amidst all the uncertainty and difficulty that lies ahead we might find ourselves at least presented with an opportunity to turn inwards again.

Having been through it before, may lockdown #2 become an opportunity for us to listen much more deeply to ourselves than those first few months of crises permitted.

And, for the many of whom this may mean working from home again, perhaps that might mean the opportunity to build in a short daytime nap once in a while!

I occasionally write poetry, so I’ll finish this Rest mini-series by sharing a poem on self-care I wrote several years ago. Thanks for reading, and if you’ve found these offerings helpful please do pass them on.

**About Me** I’m Jo,
formerly the founder Director of national climate change charity, Hope for the Future. I am currently researching eco-anxiety and how we can build emotional resilience in our response to the climate emergency.

Welcome to Climate.Emergence- a place to emotionally process what on earth is happening to us and our planet.

On… Rest #2