In case you have been clenching your teeth or using every muscle in your body to chop the vegetables, here’s an invitation to rest from that.
Take a deep breath they say. But how about we just skip to the big exhale?
We take in so much information, but, really, it is what we let go of that creates the internal space to find our grounding.
Letting go settles us, letting us live from a place of rest.
Of course, this letting go, like respiration, is something we’ll likely need to do over and over and over again. New challenges will come, but with them come the opportunity to practice—until letting go becomes easier, easy, and perhaps even as automatic as breathing.
It may take some rustling around before we can settle in—like our furry friends who, before lying down, scratch about, turning this way and that before finally nestling into a cozy place to doze off.
A couple of actual physical things you can do to facilitate letting go in your body—which goes a long way towards helping in other areas as well—are facilitated sighing and myofascial release self-treatment.
Letting go of tension creates conditions for your body to heal itself—something I see often as an MFR therapist. In spite of the sound physiological explanations for treatment outcomes, people often describe what I do as magic or miraculous. Someone even calls it “abracadabra”.
We are so used to trying hard and to forcing things that when we get results from simply letting go, we don’t know how to explain it.
In the spiritual realm, I suppose we would call this surrender. Letting go creates conditions welcoming to God and his work in our hearts and lives.
May you exhale and may your rest be sweet.