Hey and welcome back to practicing human the podcast where every day we're getting a little better at life. I'm your host

Corey Muscarra and in today's episode we're going to talk about courageous rest. More to come on that in a moment. First, let's

settle in together with the sound of the bells. I'm like to start this episode off with a poem. This is called A Courageous Rest and

it's by Thomas Martin.

Some of us need to discover that we will not begin to live more fully until we have the courage

to do and see and taste and experience much less than usual.

There are times when in order to keep ourselves in existence at all we simply have to sit back for a while and do nothing.

And for a person who has let themselves be drawn completely out of themselves by their activity,

nothing is more difficult than to sit still and rest, doing nothing at all. The very act of resting is the hardest and most

courageous act a person can perform. So I invite you to think about your own relationship to rest. We all

have a different relationship to rest for some. This is a natural part of our

well-being, how we live, how we know how to take care of ourselves so that we can continue doing what we're doing.

For others of us, this is a less familiar concept or something that we have a negative association with

because we have so many things we're doing in the world or we're just caught in a

pattern of doing.

And that could be a benign pattern.

Maybe it's just like we've got caught up in the,

you know, everyone's doing stuff, get my job, 9 to 5, do, do.

Or it could be because we're afraid to be still.

We're scared what we'll see when we stop. Or we've been so busy because we're

trying to feel a sense of worthiness that maybe started in early childhood in relationship to our parents or someone else. Who knows?

There are a lot of reasons that we can get caught in the doing and addicted to the doing, addicted to the busyness, that makes rest a really

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