Читать книгу The Book of Rest - James Reeves - Страница 23

Life can seem like a constant tug of war, with only ourselves on either side of the rope. The more we struggle, the more tension that builds, and, against our best efforts to sort ourselves out, we feel worse than before. We feel flawed, substandard, helpless, broken. We hope to introduce you to a new possibility and guide you just enough so that you might begin to see a truth that has been revelatory to many of us (a kind of ‘quiet’ movement if you will): that you cannot be broken. Fundamentally, deep down, you are already and always whole. Your deepest nature is wonderfully OK and absolutely doesn’t need fixing. The deepest aspect of your self – this ‘awareness’ we’ve referred to – already knows this. In fact, to qualify that a little further, the deepest aspect of your self doesn’t know anything; it is beyond knowledge, and it is beyond knowing – and that’s the gift.

Concepts and theories aside, being told you are fundamentally OK when you feel anything but OK can feel like a slap in the face and far, far from the truth. Therefore, we’d like to ask that if you don’t believe anything we have said so far, perhaps you could at least entertain it to be a possibility. For a short while, we ask you to just try on the idea that deep down you are fundamentally OK. Just suppose that in spite of it all, the very essence of your being wishes to change nothing about who you are or what you are going through right now. And then consider that your current beliefs about rest and how it should happen and how you should ‘do’ it might be exactly what is standing in the way of you connecting with this essence, and of you feeling rested.

If you can do this, then we can set about enabling you to experience it to be true. Our challenge as teachers is to convey something that allows the brain to ease off – to stop hunting for examples, facts and stats – and to step aside (do nothing!), so that that which lurks beneath can rise to the surface. We would be hypocrites if through this book we sought to instil a new set of beliefs in you, for it is beliefs that very often prevent us from seeing ourselves as fundamentally always OK.