When I left Washington, DC, moving to the woods of central Pennsylvania, it was out of a deep sensing that life in DC was not good for me. What I came to realize, living in these ancient mountains, was that what I had believed to be my “energy levels” for decades was fundamentally pure will power. No wonder so many health care professionals had told me my adrenals had collapsed! Slowly, I began to learn how to rest.

It wasn’t easy. I too had been fed the myth of productivity, the myth that nothing else truly measured your worth. It’s only in my 70’s that when a friend proclaims, “Oh, I’ve had a really productive week” a voice in my head goes “and that’s good because…?” Only now do I wonder about the value of rating the “doing” higher than just “being.”

As David Whyte notes in Consolations,
      “To rest is to give up on the already exhausted will
       as the prime motivator of endeavor…To rest is to
       give up on worrying and fretting and the sense that
       there is something wrong with the world unless we
       are there to put it right; to rest is to fall back … from
      outer targets and shift the goal …to an inner state of
      natural exchange.” (p. 181)
 In other words, to breathe. In and out. In and out. In and out.

One step along the path of letting go of my exhausted will was focusing more on the desired result than the work to get there – and letting others do more. Not doing things I didn’t do well. I began feeling like a competent human being, not a desperately worn out, stressed one. I was learning to let go, to make my primary job be to appreciate, to notice, to inhale and exhale.
      “Rested, we are ready for the world but not held
      hostage by it, rested we care again for the right
      things and the right people in the right way. In rest
      we re-establish the goals that make us more
      generous, more courageous, more of an invitation,
      someone we want to remember and someone
      others would want to remember too.”
      (Consolations, p. 184)

Thus, rested, I finally completed an assignment from my teacher, Hyemyhosts Storm, to write a book about leadership for women (Yin, Completing the Leadership Journey.) Rested, I could see what I had been unable to see earlier, as Black Lives Matter and the #MeToo movements arose: that women have a different path, an interior path to finding their leadership voices. Understanding that, I began to write very differently than I’d ever written before, a spiraling of insight and observation that grew like a seed, unfurling, sprouting roots and leaves.

Talking about male/female, masculine/feminine didn’t serve: I began to think in terms of Yin and Yang, energetic qualities that, while informed by gender, are not bound by it. And the more I studied Yin, the more I realized how utterly absent it is in the life of the modern world, and how much that is costing us.

It’s informative that modern dictionary definitions of Yin include darkness, passivity, coldness and death. Closer study provides a very different picture. Yin is about receptivity, the ability to move with the flow of things as they are. It’s relationship to darkness is eloquently described by brilliant theologian Barbara Holmes:
     “Darkness may be the blessed dimming of ego-
     driven striving, a destination and condition of safety
     and repose. In this state of trusting refuge, the light
     of divine revelation, which pierces but does not
     castigate the darkness, may finally be seen. This is a
     mothering darkness that nurses its offspring.”

This notion of a “mothering darkness that nurses its offspring” fits well with spiritual teacher Jeannie Zandi’s notion that Yin is a form of composting – a falling to pieces, an egoic death that allows for a rebuilding, providing the nutrients for new life. This cannot be done when one is engaged with the world. Rest, then, is central to Yin. It is the path into the center of the maze, a path of releasing intention and willfulness, and relaxing into life’s circularity.

Tricia Hersey, founder of The Nap Ministry*, notes in her manifesto, Rest is Resistance, (which I wholeheartedly recommend) that “Rest is a healing portal to our deepest selves. Rest is care. Rest is radical.” She goes on to say;