You can experience rest anywhere

Rest is not the same as sleep. If you've ever woken up not feeling refreshed, you know that you've slept but not rested. This is where taking time for conscious rest is so necessary for unwinding and re-setting. Life in this era is always demanding our attention. More than ever, deliberate rest time is a necessity for well-being.

Taking the time and the conscious space to let-go and be supported with nothing to do and no goal is more than a luxury, our being, and indeed the world, needs this for balance. It's not possible to live on over-charge all the time, this leads to imbalance, stress and sickness. All of life is a balance of doing and receiving, Yin and Yang, and modern life for most of us is severely out of balance.

We do have a choice though, and that choice is to make time for ourselves, our rest and our own personal balance in our corner of the world.

Making space for rest doesn't have to be something big or take up large chunks of time. One of the simplest practices I know is to just stop, take one deliberate breath, and just bring your focus to yourself. In that breath you are able to get out of your head and into presence by noticing your surroundings and being inside your body. Once you've taken a breath to be in that space you can resume what you were doing.

This is a powerful way to take back control of how you want to be in your life. There are many things tugging at our attention that make us leave our present awareness and go off thinking, perhaps about the future, calculating risks, worrying, planning, ruminating, judging, escaping or anywhere else our mind might go.

Being in these mind states is often a lack of feeling safe and needing to be in control. Taking time to rest and bring ourselves into the present moment reminds our nervous system that there is nothing to be done in this moment and we can rest into how safe we really are in this exact moment. It builds appreciation and acknowledgement for the support do we have right now. Simple things, such as the support of the ground underneath ourselves, the fact that we actually do have time to make space (even if it is just brief for now), that one breath we can take for ourselves to drop out of our minds and back to a rested state.

You don't need to be on top of a mountain with a beautiful view to experience stillness. You don't need money, or to go to a fancy retreat. Rest is never out of reach and no matter how small it is, you can make the shift any time you need. Rest is within your control and that is the power you have over your own life. The power to make space and notice what you need in this moment.