Live a regulated life through ‘processing time’

What happens if we don’t allow solid blocks and regular upkeep of time-out to process life?

Here are some of the symptoms:

• Overwhelmed nervous system

• Dissociation from our bodies' intelligent communication

• Unaddressed thoughts, feelings and unintegrated experiences

• Uncapable of living mindfully in presence

• Incomprehensive emotional awareness. Therefore our emotions sink internally (if you distract yourself or push emotions away, contemplate that they haven’t actually gone anywhere, they instead seep into the unconscious and interfere with the regulating of one's nervous system) rather than allowing them to move freely and as they need so they can be digested, felt or expressed.

• Eventually wear on your physical and mental health, aging your cells, cause energetic blocks and form their way as your shadow identity, coming out in unconscious behaviours, actions, communication, choices, pretty much every aspect of your life is impacted by unaddressed and unintegrated experience and emotions.   

See why it’s so important to allow processing time? You can also consider it as ‘life integration’. You want your whole human experience to be a part of the whole of yourself, rather than separate fragments which can cause the built up tension, inner conflict, feelings or behaviours that have no resolve, all of this creates disharmony in our subconscious mind and our bodies points of reference to relate to its experience and the world in which is being perceived.

‘Processing time’ may at first feel quite uncomfortable because we are usually so action orientated, addicted to the endorphins released when we get a task done. We don’t realise that most of us have a severe attachment to ‘doing’ in our modern, dysregulated culture… Trust me, I’ve been there all my life too. It’s only now that I have stepped away and undergone a deep reconstruction that I can see how detrimental and unsupportive the ‘busy’ ‘achieving’ life is for our health and inner peace.

Eventually, your system and your mind will become more familiar with ‘not doing’ and can recognise it is in fact safe to do so, this is where you’ll begin to reap the true benefits of ‘processing time’.  It does take some re-wiring and requires a lot of compassion on yourself as it won’t feel organic at first.  Things will begin to come up… Thoughts, emotions, reflections, future projections, it is all normal and I suggest to welcome it all because it is coming up for a reason, because it is feeling ready to transmute and move it through, our body and autonomic nervous system always wants to reconfigure back to homeostasis.. It just needs the right environment and circumstance to do so.  So if it feels uncomfortable, it’s a great sign because you have begun the process!  

Take conscious notice of what belief systems and thoughts arise around resting and taking space, this is a self-learning and self-awareness practice. Over time (it is a dedicated journey through continuous choice and behaviour changes) you’ll de-condition the narratives around restoration and pulling back on the over-committing and soften expectations, this allows a more subtle layer of intimacy to get in touch with your human experience. The liberation that comes from this is relieving, where you don’t have to feel guilty or have to be achieving to deserve a break or allowed to put your needs as priority, this is where true joy and peace welcomes you into a whole new way of ‘being’.. I promise you, it’s far more supportive for everyone around you to actually own your own wellbeing in this way. 

The other gains from dedicating yourself to ‘life-integrating-processing-time’ is that you’ll have a much greater capacity, more resilience and much more bandwidth to hold the bigness of what life may present to you, whether that’s past resolution, present circumstances or future direction. It allows you to be more observational and objective. It does take some courage as you are opening into aspects you have not yet created space to address, but it truly is the most vital practise that will align you to your centre and the current now, being a human being here on earth, with all the complexity, all the beauty, pain, chaos and creation. The reason you become more resilient and more adaptable to life is because you’re not carrying around the energetic baggage of conflicting thoughts, emotions, experiences or mental energy being used to resist or push away. All of this is an invisible weight, it is tiresome on our systems having unresolved and unaddressed history. Emotions are energy in motion, if they are not given the opportunity to move, it builds up, clogging precious life force from flowing organically.

If your mind and belief system find it challenging to prioritise difference choices and actions (or more appropriately non-actions), reshape the idea that it’s one of the most productive processes you can implement. It is the most beneficial way to utilise your ‘unproductive time’ as your subconscious can finally have the space it needs to sort through most likely years and years worth of ‘lifes-data’.  Imagine it as a computing system - It needs to do a regular clear out, look for potential hazards by re-organising the internal settings and make more storage space. It can’t do that if it is just running task to task and a full calendar 24/7.

The more you can give yourself to this true recovery and rest, with no plans, no doings, no needing to achieve a goal, no distractions to occupy or procrastinate the ‘being’, the better you can perform and show up for yourself, others, your career, your truth and conscious interaction with the world. So make it your mission. 

Don’t over reach by thinking you need to go into a forest for 6 months like I’ve done (although, if that calls for you then make a version of that happen, it will repay you in ways you wouldn’t even imagine) it just means slowly becoming more considerate of this concept, integrating it and prioritising it. Believe me. It’s more important than most of the things we dwindle ourselves doing such having our ‘relaxation’ through tech (which is not actually relaxing our autonomic nervous system at all, it’s just blurring out the busy mind) or by using our time ‘overthinking’ and ‘overplanning’ or keeping ourselves mentally occupied because it’s just a pattern of behaviour that feels far easier and familiar than actually welcoming ‘nothing’.

My recent 10 days of solitude silent meditation was wildly insightful - It was phenomenal the amount of processing of my human experience surfaced from my subconscious over those 10 days. Memories I have never had, events, experiences (most felt very insignificant) but I believe the spaciousness and dedicated time for my subconscious mind and body to simply sit without all the stimulation of life provided the opportunity for what felt like a ‘cleaning up’. Not that the meditation advices you to  get pulled by thoughts and get lost in them, but to allow what wants to come through to do so and to simply observe, not to push anything away, not attach to the thought forms or ideas. It did also provide the opportunity to meet some emotions and mind ‘stuff’ that was at points quite difficult, but looking away is never the answer.. From experience. Through becoming acquainted with integration and processing, I’ve found there’s a middle ground of acknowledging and evaluating and simply having it as it is without needing to label or to create a story and judgement around it. Imagine if everything or anything you’ve thought, felt or experienced didn't need to be good or bad, to mean anything or define you in any way? If that was the case - What would that open up for you?

TIPS

1. Plan your processing time. Mark it in your calendar! If you just have the intentions that once you’ve done X Y and Z you can then take the restoration and processing space, most cases it won’t happen because there’s always more that will come and we have been trained to ‘work then play’ since school. The programming of ‘once I do X I then will deserve X. There’s also the mind's sneaky way of getting out of it, if it’s not comfortable with stillness, if it's so used to stimulation, or not wanting to address the whispers of unacknowledged wants and needs.  Become okay with the idea that there’s always going to be tasks to do, your house isn’t going to burn down, you won’t die.. Be very aware that if we are waiting for the most perfect situation or circumstance then chances are it won’t happen. That is a lesson for many aspects of life.

2. If you are reading this and thinking okay.. What is actually entailed in this ‘processing’ ‘non-doing’ I understand it could seem a bit foreign, as it had been for myself and I came up against a lot of resistance and still do,  so here's some further guidance and clarity to help moisturise it in with physical explanation:

3. Ideally no tech at all.  Wake up, sit with your tea in bed, watch out the window, light an incense and let it ease you into ‘non-doing.’ 

4. Spend ‘unlimited’ time in nature IE don’t plan how long, just go with no agenda and utilise the regulation of being on the grass or listening to the sound of water or watching little insects go about their instinctual behaviours. Nature is your best allie for ‘processing time’. It can share many lessons when we observe and consider our own lives in relation. Such as noticing a decaying leaf, consider how that relates to aspects in our life that are no longer, and consider something that is coming alive now or the change that’s occurred since, consider nature with its cycles, where have you not been honouring your own cycles (and so forth)

5. Making lunch into a connective practice - Keep in the forefront of your mind that there is no need to rush, to wash the dishes faster or to be anywhere else.

6. Try not to get caught in ‘cleaning’ mode. If you do a small task, do it without any hurry, relieve yourself of ‘timeliness’..  It can be really eye opening to observe we just want to get to the next thing or to complete any actions quickly, when we really don’t need to. 

7. Put on a song or two, lie down and receive it fully.. Perhaps it’s a song that brings on a memory or a sensation that can take you into contemplation. 

8. If you want to lie in bed all afternoon - DO IT! If you want to have a shower in the afternoon and just cosy up somewhere in your home, listen to those wants. It’s your nervous system requesting to go into a more internal, intimate space.

9. Journal or doodle any thoughts if that helps unload anything in the mind. 

10. Don’t exercise if it’s coming from a ‘should’ only if it is a pure ‘want’. Disregard how long you tell yourself to do any movement and just simply be led by your energy and what you genuinely want.

Just remember… This is your own Self-discovery journey, the journey back home to a more spacious way of ‘being’ that connects you to the whole spectrum of experience, emotions, to better adapt and work with the planned and unplanned events of life with a little more grace, supporting every layer of your wellbeing.

I hope this is helpful for you - It is an absolutely fundamental part of how I experience life for my health and integration.  I can guarantee it will lead to a much more fulfilling, truth-driven, rich and intimate relationship with yourself as a human being in these big times of evolution.  At first, it’s not the easiest decision to go against our societal conditioning and our trained belief systems, but over time you will see how necessary it is and how unhelpful a lot of the past ways of doing and being can be on ourselves and therefore affects everything and everyone around us too. 

If you would like to discuss further please open a conversation with me via info@zensiretreat.com.au, this is how I am here to serve and support, to be a connection point, complimentary to anyone that’s called to truly discover freedom.. Through deep, intimate, vulnerable and expansive conversations!

Namaste,

Ruby