The Business Of Resting And Relaxing

Make it your business to take time to Rest, Renew and Redefine

What make life fruitful? The attainment of wisdom? The establishment of a just and fair society? The creation of beauty? The practice of loving-kindness? Thomas Jefferson, our forefather suggested that human life and liberty were intimately entwined with the pusuit of happiness. Instead, life has become a maelstrom of speed, accomplishment, consumption and productivity, have become the most valued human commodities. In the trance of overwork, we take everything for granted and consume things, people and information outside of ourselves. We do not take the time to savor, observe our lives not to care deeply and gracefully for ourselves, our loved ones, or our world; rather we use them all up and throw them away.

How has this happened? This was never our intention nor is it the world we dreamed of when we were waiting to grow up to mature adults. When we were young our whole life was possibility and promise not hung us getting lost in world saturated with needing to become an over achiever, grasping for the next big break, and completely unaware of our own unique joy of purpose.

We have forgotten to renew, revitalize restore our mind, body, spirit. Before you dismiss this statement as simplistic, even naïvely, we can benefit an explore more fully the nature and definition of a Sabbatical. A length of Sabbatical can be whether days, weeks, months, or years can be a far-reaching, revolutionary tool for cultivating those precious human qualities that grow only intentional quiet time. A Sabbatical can actually be the single most human intention that can cultivate desired outcomes and discover our unique joy and purpose.

The business in our lives has almost become a kind chaotic violence, so tightly wrapped into our daily life that we cannot even stretch our perception very far. It makes sense that a Sabbatical with effortless, nourishing rest and relaxation would invite healing in our life. When we consecrate a time to listen to the still, small voices, we remember the root of inner wisdom that make work fruitful. We remember form where we are most deeply connected and see more clearly the shape and texture of the people and things and people before us.

Without rest and stillness of the mind, body and spirit, we respond from a survival mode, where everything we meet assumes a terrifying prominence. When we are moving faster and faster, every encounter, every detail inflates in importance, everything seems more urgent than it really is and we react with sloppy desperation.

A sabbatical is a spiritual precept in most of the world’s cultural traditions. We must have a period in which we lie still, and restore our souls. We take the time to let our work and business life lie fallow to be nourished and refreshed. Within the sanctuary of stillness we become available to the insights and blessings of deep mindfulness that only arise in stillness and time. When we act from a place of deep rest and relaxation, we are more capable of cultivating right understanding, right action, right effort. In a complex world, if we do not surrender to some kind of Sabbatical, how can we find our way, how can we hear the voices that tell us the right thing to do? It will take a radical Sabbatical to get us started.

By Lynn Gardner
Founder and Sabbatical Guru
Radical Sabbatical. Netn