The Book of Rest
The Book of Rest: Stop Striving and Start Being by James Reeves and Gabrielle Brown
🚀 The Book in 3 Sentences
Anyone can rest. It is not a skill or a journey and no preparation or kit is needed. We just need to be us, exactly how we are to experience the state of 'being'.
Rest is a natural phenomenon, that is always occurring. It is when everything is just as it is. There are no conditions.
We are in a 'rest’ trap as countless activities that might appear to be rest inducing rarely involve rest in its purest form. We need to think simpler - when we are resting, we are wanting for nothing. We experience our being as completely satisfied, regardless of our hopes, plans, wish lists or goals.
🎨 Impressions
The book covers a captivating subject topic given the busy, don't stop, hustle all day world we live in. Finding rest seems harder than ever, therefore unlocking the secret and hearing more about the ideas of rest seems logical. The premise of the book is good, however it is in more words than needed meaning there are several parts which feel un-insightful and repetitive.
How I Discovered It
This book came up on a few podcasts I was listening to. It had received good reviews and had a captivating subtitle that pulled me in - find rest in a restless world.
Who Should Read It?
Anyone who seems over busy and wants to find more rest but is unsure exactly what that means and what it involves (which it turns out is nothing).
✍️ My Top 3 Quotes
When we rest, we are in our sanctuary, and it is entirely of our own being.
Welcome unease with ease
In many ways, we are deeply afraid of simplicity and ease, even though for many of us, our fantasy future features both these things in abundance.
📒 Summary + Notes
We’re going to show you that whatever you have going on in your life right now, part of you is always at rest. Part of you is completely calm, completely balanced, completely satisfied and completely shatterproof. This is a journey that anyone can go on. You don’t need to know anything. You don’t need to do anything in preparation. You don’t 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.
Rest is the most natural state of simply ‘being’. It happens to us when we stop and it reminds us that there is more to us than our thinking, doing and feeling experiences – rest allows us to uncover our awareness.
That we are doing nothing doesn’t mean we should expect stillness or silence or comfort.
Prepare yourself to do nothing. You might want to turn off your phone, close your computer, shut the curtains, or do whatever it takes to reduce the likelihood of you being disturbed (or disturbing yourself)
Rest is a naturally occurring phenomenon. It is the thing that happens between, behind and around all our experience. It is the space that appears, however fleetingly, between all of the activities, all of the stuff and all of the thoughts, and while we might not think it has any value, it is the glue that binds everything together.
The times in our life when we feel most rested are the times when we are not wishing to change any particular aspect of our experience. And herein lies the problem: the times we feel most rested are the times when we need rest the least. When we’re overwhelmed by our experiences and our feelings, our desire to control them becomes stronger, and we rest less. We are rest-less.
Rest is fundamentally effortless and detached from experience. Rest is, therefore, a means to connect with this always-at-ease awareness that is the essence of your existence – perhaps just to glimpse, perhaps to loiter. Ultimately, rest both connects you with this ease and reminds you that it is there, that at your very depths, you are always restfully being.
When this quality of peace becomes present in our experience it feels as though we have connected with something deep – something knowing – within ourselves, while at the same time we have a sense of being connected with everything we had thought was outside of ourselves. We, for just moments, become aware of our own smallness yet somehow feel greater for the realisation.
We, however, are suggesting that you are already OK, and that it might be that the very notion that you must do something to help you feel OK that is stopping you from feeling OK.
There are endless paradoxes around the subject of rest. We can’t do it, but we have to do it. We can’t make ourselves do it, but it must be done. We cannot have the intention of it doing anything for us, but it will do everything for us. We cannot think our way into it, but by thinking about it when we are not doing it, we will become better at not-thinking our way into it.
Many of us live with the belief that in order to be rewarded with something good we must first endure something difficult. We must work hard to get the things we want. We feel a sense of achievement if we put ourselves through a punishing workout, slog away at a work project, or even endure pain. We see difficulty as a precursor to the reward. When something good appears to land in our laps we feel suspicious, and sometimes even ashamed. We might also begrudge those to whom this happens. We are encouraged to have goals, to reach for the stars, to strive, push and plough on, even when we’re desperate for relief. If we’re not working hard at something, we’re not playing the game and we’re letting the team down. We even ask, ‘Keeping busy?’ as a means to enquire after someone’s wellbeing.
The notion that you’ll never be the best you can be unless you work hard to be better than you are right now is a shocking insult to the amazing, creative, unique being you already are, a being whose objective in life might not be to ‘win’ at everything, but to be engaged and delighted by, and kind to, the world around them, with all its gifts, surprises and mind-blowing mysteries.
The ‘rest’ trap we have today is that there are countless activities that might appear to be rest inducing, but rarely involve rest in its purest form. They have just enough of a ‘relax’ element to make us feel as though we are resting, but they have enough purpose to reassure us we are not wasting our precious free time. They leave us with something to talk about – something to photograph, share or even boast about. But they are all ways to add to our experience rather than take away.
In many ways, we are deeply afraid of simplicity and ease, even though for many of us, our fantasy future features both these things in abundance.
‘How can I find a career I love?’. We’re becoming as exhausted by our inner dialogues as we are by the practical comings and goings of our external lives. All the while, we believe that this is how it’s supposed to be: things are supposed to be hard, that we must be putting effort into improving ourselves and understanding ourselves and getting to the bottom of everything we are because as we are right now, we are not doing enough. We are not enough.
We’re encouraged to think that feeling better about ourselves is an enormous undertaking typically involving complicated methods or transformation. Whether it’s by marketing and advertising, media and pop culture, or even our parents or teachers, we have become convinced that life is riddled with obstacles that require hard work or precise techniques to be overcome.
We learn to believe that life inevitably involves a war on those aspects of ourselves that we believe are failing us. We must fight to win. We must make ourselves to change. It’s an aggressive mindset, and it’s exhausting.
When we are resting, we are wanting for nothing. We experience our being as completely satisfied, regardless of our hopes, plans, wish lists or goals.
If we constantly focus on happiness as the ultimate goal then we are danger of not being fully present with how things are in our lives right now. We might deem our current experience inadequate compared with an imagined experience in an imagined future.
We can approach our lives not as a pursuit of self-improvement but self-realisation, and take relief from the knowledge that above and beyond it all, whether experiencing happiness, sadness, grief, frustration, delight, exhaustion or confusion, we are fundamentally harmonious and complete.
As we rest and stop and allow for a glimpse of the essence of ourselves beyond our thoughts, beliefs, sensations and emotion, we are recharged by the knowledge that we have everything we ever need for whatever life hurls into our experience. We are fully synched. We are eyes-wide open living this life in the way that only we were meant to. This realisation might bring you happiness, and many more things beside.
A turnaround in your feelings about an aspect of your experience can come not by ‘positive thinking’ (or ‘shifting your vibration’), but by recognising that the stories you might be attaching to your experiences, and their related feelings, might not be true – that you are not as in control of any of it as you might think. You can recognise that you feel loneliness, for example, but that you don’t know what this might mean in regards to your ability to be at ease with your life. If you can let go of all your stories about that loneliness and instead allow it to be there just as it is, although the uncomfortable feeling remains, with it now comes an acceptance. The loneliness is present, but the power and stories you previously gave to it as a means to shape your feelings about your life are diminished. You have not put a veneer on your situation or your feelings, you have not tried to reframe them into something positive, you have simply allowed them to be just as they are.
We don’t all have these battles, but if you do, you might want to consider stepping back from your responsibilities here (again, perhaps not a very popular suggestion) and reflect on the possibility that so much of who you consider yourself to be is the result of things that have happened to you as opposed to you having made them happen. Countless and endless occurrences outside your control have crafted you into this unique and quirky being that you are today, so recognise that although you may be navigating a bumpy path, the bumps are not ‘yours’. You are on a journey; the terrain is not you, and it is not your job to fix the terrain and nor is there any reason to assume that because the terrain is bumpy you are any less of a person on any less of a journey.
Generally, we want to work stuff out. We want to have answers, solve the problem, get it sorted. We spend a lot of our lives analysing the apparent facts, weighing up pros and cons, and making choices and plans accordingly. This is one of the great tasks of the thinking mind – to help keep us safe, ahead of the game and on track with our ambitions. However, whereas this is all very helpful in life, it’s not something that helps us when it comes to resting. Our most rested, essential self is way beyond our thinking mind and not something we can ever ‘figure out’.
We have to learn to be with the trappings of everyday life without feeling that we constantly have to resist them. We have to be bold enough to admit when we’re feeling bad, both to ourselves and to others, otherwise we will be left exhausted by the alternative: denial, running away, hiding, forcing, resisting. We also want to be able to live a life that involves risks and challenges – we don’t want to hide from life as a means to protect ourselves from ever feeling pain. We have to expect and allow mistakes, misfortune, disappointment and stress in our experience; this is the deal with engaging in the world and everyone in it.
Rest is the ultimate act of allowing everything to be just as it is. It is not dependent on anything other than a surrendering of control, desire and condition. Rest has no conditions. If you find yourself trying to control rest, remind yourself that if there is one thing you need to do about your restlessness, it’s nothing.
And if you ever find yourself declaring ‘I must be more present’ in your everyday life, perhaps a more useful declaration would be (even when reaching for your smartphone) ‘I am always present’. And as you say those words, you remind yourself of, and rest back into, your inherent constant awareness (and you’ll probably be less interested in that Instagram feed from that person who likes to tell you how to be more present.
As a society, we’re very keen to express how busy we are, but not so quick to bemoan our tiredness apart from to those whom we feel especially close. Very few people would inform their boss, for example, that they are completely exhausted. We want to be seen as bright and capable, and in this way tiredness has become a matter of shame (one obvious exception to this is new parents, who are ‘allowed’ to feel tired at all times – it actually becomes ‘news’ when you are not tired). Very often, we keep our fatigue under wraps, or cover it up with that extra cup of coffee or the latest beauty products designed to make us look radiant.
We felt it important to give you a basic understanding of sleep, but we also wanted to return to some elements of our previous messages: ones that help you unwind, let go, feel at ease and find a sense of peace that’s already here. It’s important to recognise that while science is a very important tool in helping us to better understand ourselves and the nature of the human body, it cannot replace or even over-rule our direct experience. Ultimately, we have to become our own scientists, so we’d like to propose, again, that you approach any and all of the ideas presented above with a degree of scrutiny.
‘Welcome unease with ease’ might be the simplest way to sum up everything in this book.
When we rest, we are in our sanctuary, and it is entirely of our own being.
In any moments in which you have felt moved or experienced a sudden sweeping ease or a physical shift in your body, a relaxation in the breath or an insight about feeling somehow whole again, these are signs of that self shining through. That knowing coming back to itself. That sense of returning to something familiar and deeply comforting. The ‘you’ that is beyond description, measure or qualification. That ‘you’ who you know is your truth, your completeness, your unshakable restful being.
