need any kit. You don’t need any skills. You don’t need a particular body, diet or mindset. You don’t need any particular kind of anything to take this journey.
You only need you. Exactly as you are, right now, however you are.
You’re already ready.
***
Whether you’re sleep deprived, stressed, ill, agitated or even just grappling with a nagging feeling that something isn’t quite right, you are still, deep within yourself, just as OK as absolutely everyone else alive right now. At the very depths of your being, there is no resistance, tension or tiredness. There is no judgement, pain or fear. This is the very essence of who you are.
But we know this might not be a possibility you can entertain right now.
At no point on this journey do you have to ‘get your head’ around anything or force yourself into taking on a particular attitude. This is a book of gentle enquiry and incidental experience. It should require little effort other than the act of reading itself.
On the surface of things, the subject of rest might appear to be about taking a nap or getting more sleep or perhaps even kicking back with a glass of wine, but while these are some of our most favourite things to do and can benefit us in many ways, they can also distract us from the true experience of rest.
In the same way, although we are teachers of yoga and meditation and practise them often, these techniques are not in themselves always restful or always peaceful. Methods like these are intended to help us find a sense of space within our lives, but for many people they instead end up becoming something else we are adding to our experience. They become loaded with more actions, goals, frustrations and desires. . . this is not restful.
Perhaps you’ve tried yoga or meditation or other practices that you thought would leave you feeling more rested; perhaps you haven’t. It doesn’t matter. Our aim is not to train you in any of these but instead take you straight to the heart of the very thing they attempt to point towards: the constant unchanging awareness that lies at the heart of your existence.
We’re going to demonstrate that rest, and being restful, is something that is always there within you, rather than something you must weave into your experience.
How can we show you how to do nothing?
Being able to recognise and allow true rest is vital to us feeling whole, authentic and balanced. When we stop, we are able to experience the stillness that exists between and beyond our thoughts and self-narrative. Very often, we catch only a glimpse of this stillness, but this is all we need to see to know that it is there and, ultimately, if you’re willing to go all the way with us here, that it is who we really are.
Many self-help books provide the tools to go off and change your life. We hope you will read this book and, in the experience alone, see that the calm that you think will come when you’ve got it all worked out is already here. You’re just too busy trying to see it, to see it.
We will constantly urge you to do nothing. We will repeatedly reassure you that you, the world and the people around you have everything to gain from you doing nothing.
— Rest needs you to do nothing.
You will have had many moments of ‘doing nothing’ in your life before now, but what’s different is that you might not have turned your attention to this act of stopping before or how you felt during those moments. You might not even have noticed that you had stopped or thought about what that stopping was.
As we turn our attention to rest, we can explore what it’s like, and we will likely discover (or uncover) a place where everything can be welcomed, without condition, judgement or objective. A place where we are always welcome. How often does that happen in life?
ASK YOURSELF
If you can, take a moment right now to stop reading and do nothing. Ask if the stopping requires anything of you. What did you have to do to stop?
Rest might seem ungraspable, but it is always here
This restful quality we’re pointing to is hard to pin down. The challenge is that it isn’t a thing. It’s no-thing. Nothing.
It’s not something that you do; it’s something that’s always the case. You cannot get hold of it, you cannot grasp this restfulness because it’s here right now, behind and around all your thoughts.
It’s near impossible to imagine something that has no qualities. Something that by definition is necessarily indescribable. Therefore, our task now is to take you beyond your thoughts, beyond your imaginings, and into the experience of rest itself. Everything we present and any practices we have set out here are based on experience, very intentionally, to mirror this non-thing.
— No-thing is best met by nothing.
Being restful towards rest
In truth, rest is not something that can be guaranteed. You can be led to the door of rest, but nothing can open that door. The fact is, the door will open itself and, as long as you’re allowing, you will fall into the stillness beyond. Some find it easy to access this ‘quietness’, while others find it harder to get past distractions. You might stumble upon it while a-top the number 7 bus and yet find it elusive when you formally set out to do nothing.
Falling into this feeling of stillness can happen to anybody, at any time, but there are gentle approaches that might make you more prone to fall, or to more easily stumble into it. Knowing and reconnecting with this deepest quality of who you are can be a happy accident, springing out of nowhere, but we hope it might also be helped along with the suggestions in this book.
Are some people better at resting than others?
Because rest is a matter of doing nothing, anyone can rest as long as they are willing to let go of the idea that they must ‘do’ something to make it happen, or that they must somehow make themselves more ‘peaceful’. People who have been practising yoga, meditation or mindfulness for a number of years have not somehow banked any more ‘inner peace’ than Mrs Jones whose preferred relaxation technique is hitting the local bingo hall, they simply may know how to access it more readily. They are no more (or less) at peace at their core than you are, even as you read this and perhaps even believe that you’ve never been at rest in your life.
Those of us who actively engage in formal relaxation techniques (or whatever you want to call them) are simply those of us who sought out or discovered a particular process that helped us to stop, or that helped us to believe that all we had to do was stop. Once we experienced the benefits of stopping, and then falling into that stillness, we continued to stop and do nothing as often as life allowed.
A popular assumption that we regularly come across is that because we teach yoga we are inherently calm, whereas the opposite is just as (or perhaps more) likely to be true. Look at any yoga teacher’s website and read through their bio and you’ll typically see a story that begins with a person who, at a particularly low and stressful point in their lives, when all else failed, found yoga to be the only thing that helped bring them back to a place of physical and mental OK-ness. You rarely read a bio that speaks of a blissful childhood, harmonious adolescence, super-chilled career path and a sudden realisation of, ‘I really ought to share my naturally easy-going demeanour with the world.’
We ‘teachers of rest’ were at one time likely to have been extremely restless – perhaps even addicted to restlessness – and then, by various routes and accidental happenings, we discovered our innate restfulness.
You might find the techniques and processes in this book help lead you to the door of your innate stillness, or you might find you can feel your way towards it more instinctively. The rested self doesn’t care how you find it. All practices are a path to rest, but they are not