Every week Jews around the world mark Shabbat. Maybe you do that at Oraynu services, or with family dinners, or with simply taking time away from your email each week. To me, the practice of Shabbat is one of the wisest in our tradition. Humans have always needed dedicated time to rest, but perhaps never more so than today. We live in a world in which we are “connected” all the time by phone/email, meaning we are always at work, always supposed to be accessible and available, and always “on”. That’s just not sustainable, and there is a lot of research to suggest it is taking a toll on our collective mental health and well-being. Cue Shabbat.
I will admit I don’t take a full day off work every week, but I do set intentions and limits around rest. I also do a Shabbat dinner with my family each week. My heart is so full when my kids help me set up the Shabbat table, sing Shabbat Shalom, and attack a challah as though they have never eaten a meal in their lives. It is a really special time for us. Each Shabbat I try to think about some way to take care of myself; some way to really engage in the practice of recharging.
Lately, I’ve been doing a lot of yoga. If you’re interested, I recommend Yoga with Adriene on YouTube — a free yoga channel which I think does a nice job of blending the mind/body work of yoga. Each year she does a “30 days of yoga in January” series, which I have been doing (along with literally hundreds of thousands of others around the world).
Some days I’m so excited to hit my yoga mat and stretch out. Other days, it’s a real struggle to find the time and the energy. I am aware that sometimes “self-care” can feel like just another thing on the to-do list.
In one of the recent practices (it’s called “Joyful” if you want to check it out), Adriene speaks of the yogic principle of Sukah (not to be confused with a Sukkah, the huts we construct at the fall harvest festival of Sukkot). Sukah means ease. The idea isn’t that things are *easy* but, rather, when you find things challenging, when you are at your “edge,” to try to find ease and grace. Can you meet a challenge with ease? Relax in the posture of tension or difficulty? That’s the work of yoga. That, to me, is also the work of Shabbat.
Rest, true rest, isn’t easy. It’s not like the world stops around us. It’s not like our problems park themselves until Sunday when we’ve recharged enough to meet them. We have to do the hard work of finding the time and energy to take care of ourselves, even and especially when that time and energy are at their most elusive and depleted.
Sometimes people think “self-care” is about bubble baths and mani-pedis. I think self-care is about finding ease in times of tension. It’s about relaxing even when things are hard. It’s about taking time to rest in a world that doesn’t stop. And it’s about making sure that no matter what else is going on, I’m going to make sure I get to watch my kids attack a challah with gusto each week. How do you rest? How do you find ease in difficult moments?
