‘I was on the brink of burnout – now I just have a quick lie down’
Boudicca Fox-Leonard talks to the couple urging us to rediscover the lost art of doing nothing to avoid being overwhelmed by stress
J‘Make an intention to drop out of time. We all watch the clock too much, but what’s two minutes out of your life?’
ames Reeves isn’t alone in having spent far too much of 2020 on Zoom. But he has avoided the ennui of stilted conversation as, luckily for him, his online meetings tend to be onesided: regularly talking to as many as 70 people who are lying down with their eyes closed. As a leading yoga nidra teacher, he skilfully guides people into stillness.
Yoga nidra, which means yogic sleep, is a state of consciousness between waking and sleeping that has been shown to relieve stress. So run ragged are we by modern life that, as his partner and co-author of The Book of Rest, Gabrielle Brown, observes: “People in their own homes are signing up and paying to be given permission to lie down for an hour and a half.”
It’s amazing that something so simple has become so hard to do. Take any quiet moment in your day and you will feel yourself itching to fill it, often by reaching for your phone. We have got out of the habit of doing nothing.
When the hardback of their book was published in August 2019, the two of them had intended it as a guide for those heading towards burnout.
Brown and Reeves, while both yoga teachers, wanted to appeal to people put off by the jargon of yoga and meditation and show that everyone, be you an overloaded CEO or an exhausted mum with young kids, can find a moment of peace in the most frantic of days. The paperback is being published into a very different world. The pandemic has brought more uncertainty, anxiety and fatigue.
Many of our outlets for relaxation and rest have been taken away from us and as a consequence, Brown, 42, says: “It’s suddenly become more relevant to more people – this idea of being able to find a restful and calm place within yourself, rather than looking for it externally.”
As many as 8.9 million people were furloughed at the peak of the scheme in May, sent home and stripped of control over their lives – something that many people will have been ill- equipped to deal with.
“In the book we talk about how distracted we are from ourselves. What was interesting this year was that suddenly a lot of distractions were taken away from people. Their day- to- day lives were stopped. If you were furloughed your only job was to do nothing,” she says.
This raised lots of questions. How do people feel about having to stop? Who are they when they can’t control everything around them?
Key workers and home schooling parents will have had no such dubious luxury. For them, failing to make it to a meditation class on Zoom became another thing to feel guilty about.
This is precisely what Reeves and Brown wanted to address.
“The Westernisation of mindfulness has turned it into just another thing to do,” says Brown. “What we’re trying to say is that it’s not about trying, you’re already there. This is the process of subtraction.”
The couple are talking over speaker phone from their home in Oxford, where they have spent the pandemic with their two young daughters.
It’s not been easy to practise what they preach, admits Brown: “We run our own business, we’ve got two small children, and we have smartphones. It’s hard.”
Reeves, 47, has been busier than ever. His voice stands out for its lucid calm, while Brown’s is more energetic. However, it would be a mistake to assume that his is the serene force in their dynamic.
“I regularly have to tell James to go and lie down,” laughs Brown. While she says she finds it quite easy to fall into restful states, Reeves discovered yoga nidra precisely because he can be “tightly packed”.
It is often the case, he says, that when you scratch the surface of a yoga teacher, they are stress-heads. “That’s why they get into yoga in the first place! I’m happy to say that was me, and some days it still is.”
Reeves was on the brink of burnout when he started practicing yoga nidra. It was liberating for him to realise you don’t have to make a lot of strenuous shapes on a mat, that you can just lie down and feel tremendous. He was hooked.
“Quite often in the middle of the day I’ll go upstairs and lie on the bed for 10 minutes, very purposefully. Not to fall asleep, although sometimes I do, but really just to lie there and stare at the ceiling, because I know it makes me a much nicer dad when the kids get back from school.”
Everyone, he insists, has the time. “If you kept a monitor of how often you look at your screen each day, you’ve got a hell of a lot more than 10 minutes.”
For some people, scrolling incessantly or watching Netflix is what they would consider their idea of chilling out. “Relaxation is helping to calm your nervous system, for sure,” says Reeves. “But rest does it in a much faster and profound way.”
True rest provides no distractions, he explains. As a consequence, things can come to the surface. If you’re the sort of person who fidgets when they lie down, that is your stress coming out.
It’s not even as passive as the word implies. It is when we stop whirring from one thing to another that our anxieties appear.
Reeves uses the analogy of a cat. Imagine you are in a friend’s house and they have a cat. If you’re relaxed, the cat will come and sit on your lap. It wants to be stroked. It wants attention. When we stop and rest, our emotions and feelings are like that cat.
“Our thoughts want our attention while our nervous systems settle. As a result we have more capacity to meet the anxiety or the uncertainty. So we can use rest as a great way to meet those feelings that this year has stirred up for us,” says Reeves.
I wonder, though, do people want to have those experiences? If you’re facing unemployment, do you want to wallow in your thoughts? I myself, and thousands of others in the UK, are extremely anxious about the cladding crisis postGrenfell. I feel constantly stressed knowing I live in an unsafe flat, and not knowing how I’ll find the money to fix it. I can’t imagine what it would be like if you were also unemployed as a result of the pandemic.
Reeves is sympathetic but says we can’t afford not to listen to our inner thoughts. “If we’re not listening adequately or taking time to be with ourselves, how can we work out what action we need to take to move us forward?” He adds: “When we’re in bad places and continue to go flat out, we find ourselves in trouble.
“However, if we can intersperse that survivalist part of our nervous system with some rest or a quiet walk in the woods, we’re more likely to make the right decisions.”
I can see the logic. I rarely feel better for tilting at windmills. Taking a bath, leaving my phone outside, has proved a panacea, allowing me to find some quiet perspective.
Rest, like its bedfellow, boredom (RIP due to smartphones), allows our brain to drop into a natural meditative state from which we can have insight and new ideas.
And unlike paying a life coach, or visiting a spa in the Maldives, these tools are with us whenever we need them, say Brown and Reeves. Next time you are boiling the kettle, don’t pick up your smartphone. Instead, stare out the window or at a wall. “Just stop doing for a few moments,” says Brown.
The same goes for when you come home from work. “The tendency is to tidy shoes away and think about what you’re having for dinner. Instead, come in and sit down for five minutes,” says Reeves. “Don’t make it daunting, but try to do these micro moments of doing nothing.”
Another rest tip is to stop discursive ways of thinking; if I do this, and they do that, then I need to do this.
“Take a couple of minutes to give yourself permission to not know and not have to work anything out,” says Reeves. The aim is to have moments where you give up thinking, give up doing and give up time.
“Timelessness is one of my favourites,” says Reeves. “When you do stop, make an intention to drop out of time. We all watch the clock too much, but what is two minutes out of your effing life?” he says wearily.
Just by doing some of these things you will notice changes in your perception of your day. “These little micro moments become things that start to sustain you, so you can do more,” says Reeves. Rest will also help with sleep, making us more resilient to stress so that we can sleep deeper. The breath, meanwhile, can be an aide to rest, helping to balance the nervous system. Reeves and Brown deliberately didn’t include practices that manipulate the breath in the book, but rather ways to observe it, because they didn’t want it to become yet another challenge for alpha strivers.
“What we’re trying to propose is that all you need to do is stop. You don’t have to do 108 sun salutations while fasting,” says Reeves. In doing nothing, if only for two minutes, we can all, regardless of the chaos and anxiety of the year just gone, find a calm and steady spaciousness within ourselves.
“What we’re proposing is so simple that it can be very upsetting for some people, because the solution is within their reach, and we quite like an excuse for feeling stressed out,” adds Brown.
“But the state of meditation that’s inherent in all of us is always there. It’s not glamorous or aspirational, you won’t be posting pictures of yourself doing it on Instagram, but it is transformational.”