The secret Art of Chilling

How do you chill?

It’s a serious question, because I honestly had no answer to this question. My girlfriend would be the first person telling me to take a break and properly relax.

The answer was, I don’t know how!

In my “it’s not enough“ mind, anytime I’d finish work, I would come up with more work from my 5 days a week office job to my out of office Chinese Medicine Acupuncture business and finally all the postgrad thingmajig I’m filling the rest of time I don’t have.

All of this to demonstrate to myself and my preconceived judgemental societal belief system that I can be worth of my own respect.

Pretty mad, isn’t it?

What hit me really, after weeks (or months) into my Fertility and Gynae Chinese Medicine postgrad is something that one of my teachers said in a lecture (thank you Jill, you’re a wonderful human being and an incredible teacher!)

“In our society we look up to people who have achieved incredible and extreme feats, but don’t have any frame of reference for how to look after or either value our Qi and energies“

We don’t have frame of reference for resting and look after our own energy, there’s a lot of celebrating Yang and very little valuing Yin principles.

I’ve met lots of patients and not, that would say to me the proverbial: “I’ll sleep when I die“ whenever I’ve nudged them to rest more.

And how could I give them contempt, if the first one who was not taking his own advice was ME!

So I did it, I went on holiday and decided I’d take a real rest, only me, my girlfriend the beach and the food on a Greek island!

Turns out it was what the doctor ordered! It did me a lot of good.

It’s so funny that once you stop doing lots of things, your mind becomes so creative and bursting with ideas, both on what I could do with my Acupuncture work (which I felt was going very stale at some point) to why resting is a good idea, I could see the whole picture for the first time in a long while!

So I kept resting while looking at the world and I’ve noticed that:

People go slower on a island, even car don’t speed along the highways, it’s so full of curves between the hills that forces you to take it slow and enjoy the view.

People who lived on the island looked generally happier and so were we, things work out within the time they need to work out and everyone there seemed fine with it. It didn’t have to be there and then, getting to one part to the other could take half an hour, and that was fine, nobody was on a strict schedule, so isn’t nature.

Nobody was pressured by time or deadlines, they just knew the exact amount of time would take for moussaka to cook, for the harvest to come and for the sun to rise and set.

I learned a valuable lesson and the reminder of it now sits in front of me everyday:

Take a breather at least once a day!

Respect your night-time sleep because tomorrow-you will thank you for that kindness.

Remember to have fun! Probably the biggest reminder of them all, laughter is the heart antidote and we forget that too often in our lives, taking everything so seriously we stagnates our livers and galls on it.

Hope this resonates with some of you, hope you find the joys of resting too and celebrate your own Yin.