What would you change?

I know a young person who has been stuck for more than a year.  She trained hard for a career, had initial success, and then suffered a physical setback that made it impossible for her to continue in the same path.  That would be hard for anyone. It is especially hard for a much-loved child who had no reason to believe life could change that fast.

We say that the young are resilient - and they are. The forms of their resilience are not always what we would choose.  They can stay stuck quite ferociously. 

My young friend is stuck.  She does not yet want to be unstuck.  Having flung herself into one brick wall, it is understandable that she does not want to run into the next one.  From the point of view of stuck, any motion is dangerous.  From the point of view of stuck, we do not see that sometimes it is the walls that run at us.

I have other friends who are stuck because they are tired. They work hard and long and they make sincere efforts to meet the needs of the people around them.  Their activity is not just spinning wheels - they produce real results in many areas - but it is also not moving them forward.  At the end of the day, they are too tired to imagine change.

Rest is not stopping. Rest is the state where we are able to fully imagine difference.  We rest in trance (hypnotic or daydream) when we let our minds escape from external conditions to create their own.  We rest in our beds when we let go of the millionth item on the to-do list and sink into sleep.  We rest in activities that unwind the knots in our muscles and our minds.

The training I do is hard work, for me and for my clients.  It involves many hours of learning and doing.  At the end of the day, we are all ready to sleep.

The training I do is restful.  It unravels the tight and twisted places and allows us all to imagine difference.