Intentional Rest

I didn’t think it was possible to be bad at relaxing. I assumed relaxation was the default state for the human mind and it needs to be constantly whipped away from distractions and into the current moment to focus on the task at hand. As my friend Gavin would say, this is very much what Eisenstein calls the “War on the Self”. Relaxation is a honed skill, not the nature of the self, and I am very jealous of those who can drop into it without aid.

I was talking to my friend Nick about meditation practice…7 years ago. “I was just sitting there one day and I thought ‘why not try meditating’ and before I knew it 25 minutes had passed.” The sheer jealousy! I had been practicing meditating for a year at the point and had nothing close to that kind of ability to drop into a less frantic mental state.

There was even a time that I thought my racing thoughts and hyper-vigilance were a sign of my INCREDIBLE intelligence, and not just a sign but the core of it. If I let go of those things, stopped the crazy thoughts, I would lose what gave me value and the lifestyle that my family had been working for since we came to America. This is maybe what hooked me about Viet Thanh Nguyen’s The Sympathizer, the first paragraph is someone speaking very frankly about their talent:

I am a spy, sleeper, a spook, a man of two faces. Perhaps not surprisingly, I am also a man of two minds. I am not some misunderstood mutant from a comic book or a horror movie, although some have treated me as such. I am simply able to see any issue from both sides. Sometimes I flatter myself that this is a talent, and although it is admittedly one of a minor nature, it is perhaps also the sole talent I possess. At other times, when I reflect on how I cannot help but observe the world in such a fashion, I wonder if what I have should even be called talent. After all, a talent is something you use, not something that uses you. The talent you cannot not use, the talent that possesses you - that is a hazard, I must confess. But in the month when this confession begins, my way of seeing the world still seemed more of a virtue than a danger, which is how some dangers first appear.

I didn’t realize then that those were symptoms of anxiety - I was young, healthy and didn’t drink caffeine, so anxiety didn’t seem like a good fit. Everyone always praised my talent, my spirit, my enthusiastic energy. When I joined my job and had less chance to be as effusive, I started burping a lot. I remember being overly concerned with this and I went to a doctor.

“Listen, there’s nothing wrong with you but you need to relax.”

Hearing someone tell you to relax does one of two things: it relaxes you or it infuriates you. If you don’t have the skills to self-soothe, you will simply be infuriated by everyone’s entreaties to chill (“Great! More things they want me to do!”). If you do know how to relax and you trust the person saying it to you - e.g. a voice in a meditation session you intentionally tuned into - this is actually a really useful phrase.

I’ve been cultivating things to help me intentionally relax - candles are helpful (even when they accidentally start mini disasters). I’ve been working through a lot of sessions on Calm and I often feel hyper sensitive to the world afterwards. The hyper sensitivity does not help me navigate the world better and results in me feeling a bit ashamed that I cannot take going outside into the light. It’s like I’ve become a cave troll. Even exercises that help me relax my jaw, or self-massage go a long way towards relaxing the body. The mind usually follows suit after. A lot has been written about the way the body and mind relate to each other and I won’t go into that now, but I definitely find that relaxing the body is a cheat code that stops all the anxious thoughts. Or maybe it’s just a distraction. Either way, paying attention to the body in all the little ways is a nice big red intentional rest button.