Micro-Moments of Rest

Hi, welcome back to your Daily Mindfulness. In today's session, we're going to talk about micro moments of rest. For a lot of people, you have a lot going on in your life and it can feel hard to take time out to actually rest. And for many people that I've worked with over the years, one of their pushbacks to things like meditation is like, Cory, I don't have 20 minutes to practice. I don't have 10 minutes to practice.

I hardly have five minutes to go to the bathroom in the morning before the kids wake up. And that tends to shift as meditation becomes more of a priority, but I always want to meet people where they are. And so it's caused me to look for, for ways for folks to really find moments throughout the day, in very short bursts, where they can actually experience some rest. And I pull from an experience I had with yoga to help people find this for themselves. For a while I was practicing hot yoga.

And if you're not familiar with hot yoga, it's essentially, they've locked you in a room, turn up the heat and, yeah, and make you do all these poses until you can't breathe. Okay. That's not actually how it goes, but that's what it felt like for me the first time that I was doing it. You're doing yoga and, and there's a lot of heat there. And for, for me, the first half of, of that sequence, which was all standing was very intense.

But halfway through, we'd finally get to lie down on the mat. And I craved those moments. Unfortunately though there was still some intense poses that we would do while we were lying down. And during one of them, there were these small pockets where we didn't have to do anything. We'd go up in Cobra pose like this, where we'd really be arching our back.

But then we get about 10 seconds to fully rest and to fully let go. Now I, at first didn't use those ten second periods to let go. I used those ten second periods to ruminate about how much I hate yoga and how much I didn't want to go into the next Cobra pose. But eventually, mainly as a form of making it through the sequence and surviving the sequence, I allowed myself to really just completely disengage in those moments. Five seconds, 10 seconds.

Not thinking about what was to come next, letting my body totally relax, softening all the tension that might've been there in my body. And then going into the next post. While I was there, allowed myself to fully be there. Then I would rest. Only would be five seconds, 10 seconds.

But instead of ruminating and pulling the tension from the previous pose or the next pose into that moment, I really let myself be where I was. And that actually became the key for me navigating those sequences and making it through it without being totally exhausted. And I started pulling that into my life and offering that for other people to explore in their life, where you might not have these 20 minute, 30 minute periods where you complete, can completely let go and just meditate. But you might have these one minute intervals, these 30 second intervals, these five second intervals where nobody actually needs anything from you, where you can let your guard down, where you can relax your shoulders, where you can just be. My invitation to you is to really inhabit those moments.

Let yourself absorb the goodness of them. Let go of the ideas of what's going to come next. It'll, it'll happen anyway. It's going to come anyway. And instead, really inhabit the goodness of non-doing, let it restore you.

And I think what you'll find is that these micro moments of rest really offer a lot of nourishment for the rest of your day. Thank you for your practice. Let's settle in for today's meditation.