We were lying down feeling the support of the ground when Len asked us to view ourselves as an alien might, noticing where breath was moving and where it was not. Tears came as I envisoned myself seen this way, seen from outside of myself. I felt as though there were areas of light and movement, and areas of darkness and holding, where breath was stopped, not allowed to go. Feeling that, there was a shift, opening, breath from head to toe, front to back. There was a "field" in which I was held, breathed.
We raised our arms to feel "celestial gravity", the pull of planets and stars. Vanessa led us to pause and rest, to explore pausing and resting. She read these words of David Whyte from his book, "Consolations: The Solace, Nourishment, and Underlying Meaning of Everyday Words."
REST
is the conversation between what we love to do and how we love to be. Rest is not stasis but the essence of giving and receiving. Rest is an act of remembering, imaginatively and intellectually, but also physiologically and physically. To rest is to become present in a different way than through action, and especially to give up the will as the prime motivator of endeavor, with its endless outward need to reward itself through established goals. To rest is to give up worrying and fretting and the sense that there is something wrong with the world unless we put it right: to rest is to fall back, literally or figuratively from outer targets, not even to a sense of inner accomplishment or an imagined state of attained stillness, but to a different kind of meeting place, a living, breathing state of natural exchange...
-David Whyte