It has been a little while since I last connected with you through this channel. As many of you know, I have had my hands full opening our very own trauma-focused clinic. The final touches are being added, and we are bringing together a team of incredibly skilled, warm-hearted clinicians. It has truly been a labour of love, and I hope many of you will enjoy the space as much as I have enjoyed creating it.
Over the last few months, I have had a number of small revelations, and I thought I would start sharing one with you in each newsletter. The theme that keeps returning for me lately is rhythm.
We live in a world illuminated by synthetic light, confusing circadian rhythms that have guided us for thousands of years. We have become disconnected from darkness. We are afraid of the thoughts, fears and sadness that might be waiting for us there if we are still. I recently read that over ninety percent of people watch screens before falling asleep, which exposes us to a constant sense of daytime and stimulation and activity. Many of us spend very little time outside, noticing where the sun is in the sky or watching the day unfold. Our bodies lose many of the cues that help orient us to time and place. And in a country where the seasons barely change, it can feel as though time itself has lost its shape.
I wonder, if our bodies could speak, what they would tell us. They would demand more rest, gentle movement and stillness. Perhaps we have simply become very good at ignoring them.
The trouble is that in a productivity-driven world, we rarely allow ourselves to rest until our bodies force us to. By the end of the day, we collapse onto the couch, convinced we are resting. Yet so often we have simply exchanged one form of stimulation for another. We stop working and disappear into entertainment. It may feel restful, but it is rarely the kind of restoration our bodies have been asking for all along.
Nature speaks in rhythms. The tides move in and out with the moon. Flowers open in the morning and close again as the light fades. Birds migrate across continents. Cicadas spend years underground before emerging together. Bones inside your body are constantly breaking down and rebuilding themselves. Women's bodies are perhaps one of the clearest reminders that we are cyclical creatures.
One rhythm that has completely fascinated me recently is something called the ultradian rhythm. As humans, we seem to be capable of deep focus for around ninety minutes before our brains begin asking for a short period of recovery. It is often around then that concentrating becomes just a little more effortful. It is often subtle. Concentration fades, your body becomes restless and your attention starts looking elsewhere. Our response is often to push through. This may not be the most helpful, let alone productive response.
I know that for me, despite being a self-proclaimed nature lover, in reality I had become divorced from the biorhythms that connect me to the natural world. I would work late into the evening, wake before my body was ready so that I could rush to a spin class, ignore any signs of fatigue, and somehow forget that nature was not just something outside of me.
We forget that we are part of the animal kingdom, and no amount of deadlines or artificial urgency changes the fact that we simply do not run like engines. We have seasons and cycles that need to be respected in order for us to stay well.
I am lucky enough to have many wise teachers and practices that help me reconnect whenever I lose sight of that. EMDR is one of them. I have often wondered whether the rhythmic bilateral stimulation has a similar effect to swaying, allowing us to move a little deeper into the unconscious and allow us to hear ourselves more clearly. There is something about rhythm that seems to tell the nervous system that it is safe enough to remember something we have forgotten.
Rest is not something separate from life. It sits at the centre of all these cycles. Every living system seems to know this. There is a season for growth, and another for letting go. The tide retreats before it returns. The body exhales before it inhales again. And there is always a gradual transition toward stillness, it is not, as Edison's light bulb has taught us to believe, simply a matter of flicking a switch.
I, like many of you, have no intention of becoming someone who lives by the phases of the moon or only works when my ultradian rhythm allows it. Life is not that simple. But I have spent much of my life trying to get better at overriding my body, and I am far more interested now in learning how to listen to it. Has your body been trying to tell you anything?
If you are not sure where to start, just notice. Imagine yourself as a shell resting on the ocean floor. It does not chase the current or resist the waves. It allows itself to be carried by the slow rhythm of the sea, surrendering to the simplicity of the ocean sound and the gentle swaying of the waves.
Comments