Letting our ideals rest for a while

Last night in a webinar we explored the vulnerability of resting. My mentor, Dr. Neufeld, said “all growth comes from a state of rest.” There’s much we can unpack about this statement, for there are many levels of rest.

One form of rest is resting from our ideals – softening the expectations we hold for ourselves. This includes our healing.

Sometimes it’s hard to rest! Our yearning for wellbeing can make us frantic or harsh. We can turn our human experience – what poet Padraig O’ Tuama calls ‘the interesting conversation,’ with all of its complexity and fullness – into a good or bad binary.

When we feel happy, or grateful, or peaceful, we may feel ‘good,’ and feel approval for ourselves. We can feel safe and at rest. We feel accomplished somehow – as if peace is a personal achievement.

But when we feel sad, lonely or angry, we often feel ‘bad.’ We may feel scared or worried. We may diminished, like our wholeness is somehow ‘less’ because of this less than ideal experience.

Ideals are such interesting creatures.

When I face my own ideals, I see how they’re literally disembodied – these thoughts, ‘shoulds,’ and pictures that are disconnected from reality, from the truth of who we are and where we are.

They’re blind to the complexity of the big picture, and to the way our lives are always moving, never a static, compartmentalized ‘thing.’

And yet we treat them as substantial, as real, and as the truth. We can spend our entire lives trying to meet them.
This is how the disembodied, disconnected voice speaks.

No one else sees our ideals. And yet they carry such weight. Our ideals permeate every relationship we have – with food, with each other, with the world, and with ourselves. So often we feel anxious, tight, afraid or frustrated because we aren’t meeting our ideals for ourselves.

In these moments, it helps to remember: ah, this is disconnection. This is the voice of disconnection speaking. Can I let these ideals rest for a while?

If our ideals are not tangible things, perhaps they can move, bend, and flow? Perhaps they are not so substantial or rock solidly true.

It also helps to remember that disconnection is not a personal flaw but a necessary part of life.

Connection ebbs and flows, in the same way hunger and satiation ebb and flow, in the same way our breath flows between the in and outbreath. We can turn this into an ideal, too, where we feel ‘bad’ when we feel disconnected.

The answer to disconnection is connection – to return to our breath and to our bodies, to soften, and to come home to ourselves. The pain of disconnection is a cry to connect, not a judgment against us.

The ideals will arise. The thoughts will arise. The ebb and flow of our lives will arise. Some days we’ll be filled with gratitude. Other days irritation will peck at our hearts. Connection and disconnection will come and go.

Can we not let any of this diminish ourselves?

I’ll close with a poem from the beloved Mary Oliver, When I Am Among the Trees. We used this poem to close our community gathering last night and soaked in the rest of her words.

Take a listen, and see if your ideals soften. Go easy, friends. Go light.