How To Be Productive During Your Rest Cycles
Have you ever thought about rest as productivity? Or more importantly, how rest AND productivity intersect together.
Over the last 2 years of a global pandemic, social media spaces have been flooded with content about the importance of rest. Rest has suddenly become important to us all as a Collective. We are now realizing the impact of our hustle driven/motivated lives, and the need for rest that exists within us all. We are starting to see how trying to maintain and sustain those 40, 50, 60+ hour work weeks is not actually good for us. It does not bring the outcomes that we need it to bring.
Of course, as the energy type with a very unique connection to rest, the depth of this lesson is hugely important to us as Manifestors.
Manifestors and the Need For Rest
On one level, Manifestors are non Sacral beings, so we don’t have the Sacral drive that Generators and Manifesting Generators do. The Sacral energy provides a very real physical energy that is consistent, it likes to complete things, and has a sense of satisfaction. The Sacral center produces a lot of physical motor energy, and as non Sacral beings, we simply do not have access to that.
Like all other non Sacrals (Projectors and Reflectors) we are naturally more tired beings. We have less energy to get things done throughout the day than the vast majority of the population. We all know that. But the deeper level for this as Manifestors is that our energy runs in a really unique cycle.
The Manifestor energy runs in a Creation – Rest Cycle. We have big creative pushes when we initiate and birth new things into life. This is then followed by rest, because it is hard work to initiate.
We play the role for the Collective of being the birthing mothers. We go through growing a concept that needs to come to life, we nurture it, we nourish it, and we hold on tightly to it. Then the labour process happens, and we are able to push it out into the world. This journey comes with a lot of fear, a lot of uncertainty, a lot of vulnerability, and with a great deal of effort as well. A Manifestor needs to inform frequently (challenging!), we need to be very present, we need to let ourselves be seen, and we need to utilise the magnetic qualities of our aura. In other words, it is a super big deal for us to Initiate.
Like any mother after having given birth, (I’ve given birth 3 times, trust me, it’s tiring) we need an enormous rest.
This is very different to our other non Sacral friends, the Projectors and Reflectors, because they are not initiating. The Projectors manage on a daily dose of rest. The Reflectors manage their energy through their environment. And Manifestors are subject to the unpredictable rhythm of these energy cycles.
How Much Rest Do We Really Need?
Rest is central to everything for a Manifestor. Rest is the key player in our ability to initiate because we have to rest in order to have space and capacity to be able to initiate. But we also need to rest to recover from an initiation. Double rest.
So our rest has two functionalities, both of which are centered around our ability to be the initiators. That is our role, it’s what we came here for. The way we give ourselves the ability to enact that role as initiators is to rest. Rest after we have initiated and before we initiate again.
Practically speaking that means that as a Manifestor, you are going to be resting more than you are creating. You will be resting for approximately 80% of the time, and you will be initiating/creating for 20% of the time.
We are resting so much more than we are doing anything else. In a society that has some very messed up ideals around rest, this is a challenging area for Manifestors. It is a challenging area for everyone, but the Manifestors take on it is like everything else; unique.
Most of us are already aware that we need a lot of rest and that rest is really integral for us. But what about when we look at it through the lens of productivity?
Rest and Productivity
This is where we start to fuse back in with what’s happening with the Collective at the moment because we are starting to see this change in narrative around “rest being lazy” to “rest being productive”.
When we look at productivity, we are socially primed and socially conditioned to believe that productivity is about what we produce. Productivity is about the work that is produced when we are being productive. We talk about productivity in metrics; in tangible/material things that we can grasp, measure, project and understand.
Social norms discuss how productive the average worker can be in an 8 hr day. How productive are you in your job, in your career? How productive are you within your business? Are your tasks productive money making tasks? Are there elements of productivity that you can hand off to other people to be more efficient and more effective at that productivity?
We even look at productivity in terms of manufacturing. How much production can a manufacturing system have? If we have a factory that produces barbie dolls, how many barbie dolls a day, or a week, or a month can that factory produce and can we make the system more efficient? Can we make the system more streamlined and thus, have a higher output of productivity. This is where the saying “work smarter not harder” has come from because socially we have recognised that working harder doesn’t necessarily create more productivity and it doesn’t necessarily produce more tangible results. We can instead look at the systems, and work “smarter” to create more productivity. Instead of putting in more hours to produce more, we can refine the way we are doing things and therefore produce the same amount or a higher amount.
While the concept of ‘work smarter not harder’ has been effective for us as a Collective for a long time, often working smarter is working harder, because we are just moving that energy from physical stress to mental stress.
When we are applying the concept of productivity to rest, your subconscious brain (the part of the brain that determines your belief systems, habits, routines, behaviours, feelings and emotions) is sent into a tailspin. This subconscious brain has spent decades being told that productivity is an action. Productivity is something that you do. Productivity is something that you see because productivity produces material outcomes. All along you have been working under the belief system that productivity means producing outwardly and working hard. That doesn’t mesh with rest.
Many of us are struggling with feeling a resistance to rest. The feeling is “When I rest, I am lazy, because I am not producing and not being productive”. We have a well formed belief system and our actions are not matching that belief system, so we have cognitive dissonance. We then shift our behaviour to alleviate that cognitive dissonance because it feels awkward, uncomfortable and it does not feel correct. We change our behaviour by adding productive behaviours into our rest time. We don’t fully switch off. We only partly switch off.
We may take a day off from work, we might turn our laptop off, we might not check social media. But instead we turn on some other stimulating device. We turn on Netflix, we throw ourselves into social media, we do education, we do digital online learning, we participate in a group course/program , we read through blogs, we search for recipes.
Our rest can start looking like, “I’m just going to reorganise the house, I’m going to clean out my closet, I’m going to rearrange my pantry, I’m going to do that deep spring clean that I have been wanting to do for ages, I’m going to run an errand, I am going to do all of these domestic things that I haven’t been doing.”
We start to add in elements of productive behaviour into our rest. So physically we may be on a reduced load, but our nervous system is definitely not switched off. Your brain is also not switched off. We find ourselves resting but not actually resting, so the resting actually makes you more tired.
As a Manifestor, when your rest plays a pivotal role in both being your place of recuperation and your place of creating space for the next Creative Urge/initiation to come through, guess what happens if you are not actually resting? You don’t recover, and you don’t feel your next Creative Urge.
So frequently I speak to Manifestors who say “I haven’t had a Creative Urge for ages and I feel like I have been in this Rest Cycle for ever, I cannot even remember the last thing that I created and I don’t know what my Creative Urge feels like”. My first question is, are you actually resting? Or are you in a false state of rest where you tell yourself you are resting. Perhaps you have spent 24 hours binging the latest tv show on Netflix....but was that the rest that your body actually needed? Or was your nervous system still wired? Was your brain still going? Were you still picking up your phone every 6 minutes to check what was happening on social media? Were you still responding to emails? Were you still thinking through all of the things that you “should” be doing with your life?
If you are physically resting, but you are just not working, then what were you filling your time with?
And I’m not saying that as a Manifestor rest needs to be a cryogenic state of being frozen in time. We don’t need to be stuck in bed, tucked all the way down, completely covered and wearing pajamas. We don’t even need to be in a meditative state. Rest for you as a Manifestor is whatever is required for your body to actually shut off. To actually have your nervous system shut down. To actually have your mental function stop and take a break and disconnect.
That might be going out in nature. It might be doing a gentle walk. It may be some form of exercise like dance. It might be watching your favourite movie. It might be watching Netflix. It might be drinking herbal tea. It might be making your favourite food. It might be going on a holiday to a different location. It could be any number of things for you.
The point is – You don’t need to be productive in the traditional sense of productivity while you are resting.
What if we looked at productivity differently? What if we looked at productivity as not being about something that you tangibly produce? What if we saw productivity not as a material metric, not as something you can see, hold or feel or measure but as an energetic state?
Try this reframe: Productivity is something that our energy is always doing and when we are resting, we are still being energetically productive.
Rest Is Productive
When we are in a state of rest, when our body is physically resting and we are mentally disconnected and our nervous system is shut down , our energy is still moving because we are energetic beings and our energy is always working either in alignment or in misalignment.
Our energy is naturally a very productive thing, it is always moving towards producing something, it is always healing something, it is always moving or unpacking something, it is always gathering and preparing for something.
So on a super simple level we can understand that rest is energetically productive for us because our energy is gathering together in preparation for our next Creative Urge/initiation. By allowing ourselves to deeply and truly rest, we are investing in our future material productivity by allowing ourselves to be energetically productive right now. And that in its simplest form, is profound.
Energy is always processing things and your energy is always healing things. Your Defined Energy centers are always processing. If you are an Emotional Manifestor, then you are always processing emotions. If you have a defined Spleen, then you are always processing fear. If you have a defined G center, you are always processing identity, your sense of purpose and what direction you’re going in. If you have a defined Head, you are always processing ideas and things that inspire you.
You are continuously processing on a consistent sustained loop. Your energy is doing that for your benefit. Therefore when you are going through a rest time, not only is energy processing happening for you, and it’s happening on your behalf, which literally is productivity, but when you allow yourself to, your energy can be used for deep healing. Healing can only be obtained through a state of rest. When you are healing, you are contemplating and reflecting – both are key aspects of rest.
You may not even be doing that in your conscious state. You might be doing that in your unconscious state. Your energy is processing and healing for you when you are sleeping. When you are napping. When you are doing something else but your nervous system is in a state of passive shutdown.
So rest!
