Recently I was in the midst of a big project and I had shared with some friends that I was really tired. Someone suggested that I take the morning easy and rest in preparation for the big meeting I had around lunchtime.
I am pretty sure that I scoffed at the idea – “Are you for real? I have too much to do! Have you not seen my to-do list?” But something inside of me was asking me to go deeper with this and neither gloss over what I was feeling, nor what was being suggested to me, as I had done in the past. So in that moment I expressed that I didn’t know how to – I didn’t know how to stop.
Some suggestions then came forth about how to stop and I realised that I actually do know how to stop, but I don’t put it into practice often enough.
I just kept going.
- Just get this job done.
- Just tidy up the kitchen.
- Just send that email.
- Just put that load of washing on… and then I will stop.
Even then, when I did stop, I never really stopped to truly rest or nourish my body. When I ‘downed tools’ I stopped for a cuppa and a biscuit, just as I used to stop with a glass of wine and a cigarette: or when I ignored nearly all of the messages to stop from my body, it increased the intensity of the messages and said very loudly, ‘STOP!’ and I got sick and was forced to stop and rest – often feeling like my body had betrayed me.
But through Universal Medicine’s presentations, I am learning how to be with my body and listen to the wisdom it shares quietly, taking the moments to stop and be with my body and to nourish it.
I have also learnt the importance of taking care of myself, and through the healing modalities of Universal Medicine I am learning to bring to a halt the relentless momentum that I have been living with that makes it difficult for me to stop.
So I stopped in the name of love (for me), lovingly put on some moisturiser and covered my body in eye pillows (small heat packs). Then I lay down for a couple of hours and rested. I even fell asleep.
The world did not fall apart. It did not end because I took two hours off. I simply rested because that was what my body was sharing with me it needed to do. I awoke with a renewed sense of care and love for myself and with a deep appreciation of taking the time to stop. I then went about my day much more openly, rather than in the tension of having to push through to get my ‘stuff done’. And P.S. – the stuff got done!
Nowadays I am looking to bring in more stop moments – a loving work in progress because some days I still override the need to stop. I am, however, choosing more and more to be present with my body, listening to what it is saying and stopping when it is needed.
I am learning that life is simply more joyful when I choose the quality in which I do something and that these choices about my quality are equally as important as my actual output.
In loving appreciation of Serge Benhayon and his family; and of my friends, who asked me to reconnect to something that I knew, as well as a deep appreciation of me, for taking the time to stop.
By Sarah Flenley, Cairns, Far North Queensland, Australia
Further Reading:
The ‘Self-Care ABC’
Stopping Within Sight of the Finish Line
Early to Bed, Early to Rise, Makes you Healthy, Wealthy and Wise
The Truth about Universal Medicine 
Recognize this very much Sarah, almost feeling guilty that I stop. It also shows how much identification there is with how much and what I do. Fortunately, that is dropping away more and more, because I feel that my worth, my beauty is not in what I do, but who I am – and who I am is beautiful. I knew that for a long time to be true, but now, lately I am starting to feel that on a consistent basis in my body as well, which is also radiating out to the world.
Sometimes a stop moment calls for a rest, but most times a stop moment calls us to stop the energy that is running us and realign to the Divine.
Yes Kathleenbaldwin, I agree. When I stop I check my breath and how connected I am to my body first off and feel my heart and realign…such a vital step.
Thank you for sharing this beautiful reminder that being in connection to the quality of who we are supersedes the quality of doing any day and in fact brings greater enjoyment to all that we do regardless of what it is.
More and more these days I am correcting myself when I say “I don’t know” when it comes to my feelings or choices being or needing to be made. It might not come straight away but if I open up with “ I don’t know YET” soon the answers become apparent.
Love it…that little word YET gives us so much space for the truth to show itself.
It is challenging sometimes to bring ourselves to a stop, to honour ourselves and not override all the messages our body gives us, when we actually stop and allow ourselves to rest, our movements afterwards are of a much more refined and delicate quality as we are connected to our essence.
This was great for me to read this morning before I am about to start my day and think of all the things that I need to do! Especially this ‘and listen to the wisdom it shares quietly,’ I feel like I rarely just give myself the time to stop and be with me as reading your blog what I could see was when I do things like send an email or put a load of washing on etc I think that is me stopping!!!!!! It looks like I have something to learn here … to listen and care for my body more.
Recognize this fully Sarah, how we love to stay in the motion of things. Because if we would stop we would actually feel how awful, tired, stressed etc we feel. In other words, in motion, keeping on doing things we override the signals the body, our best friend, is giving us.
I can relate very much what you shared about not knowing how to stop and in my case I didn’t even know how to be with myself. I felt very strange and uncomfortable being alone on my own so I looked for a lot of distractions, activities and relationships in order to not feel my own discomfort. Today I appreciate my choice of learning step by step how to care, be and embrace myself as I know deep down within that I deserve. As you said Sarah, it is a loving work in process that feels very enriching and new.
‘I awoke with a renewed sense of care and love for myself and with a deep appreciation of taking the time to stop.’ Such a precious feeling Sarah. Instead of pushing ourselves through to getting things done there is another way, we can listen and honour what our body has to say. I’m amazed of how grateful it is and how quickly it regenerates after a difficult day. It sustains us in a very loving and unconditional way so it is worth to take care it deeply.
When we listen to our body saying ‘Stop’ we start to understand why we have to take more loving care of ourselves.
Your blog title Sarah, is such a glorious re-imprinting of the old emotional song title!
That was the first thing that came to me too Lyndy, I saw the ladies before my eyes and the song in my ears and standing still when they sang the word ‘stop’. I truly love this title and blog, this is really make us stop and feel how life is about quality and that’s not what the song did years ago.
To have the doing and then the downtime or relief is a pretty common pattern – and so what I have understood from Universal Medicine is the huge importance of cutting this cycle and actually understanding the important balance of repose and motion. And that if we are in repose – it is very different to switch off time or just sleep – it is about a surrender in the body and not taking any more new information in but rather confirming what we have taken in during the motion phase. This allows us to see a fuller and more complete picture of what is at play.
Sarah, I love this, it makes me laugh every time I read it and reminds me that I can put myself first and to rest when I need to; ‘The world did not fall apart. It did not end because I took two hours off. I simply rested because that was what my body was sharing with me it needed to do.’
I love the title of this blog and am choosing this more and more but can still find it challenging at work where my self-worth can still be tied up in what I achieve so I put pressure on myself to keep going because there is so much to ‘do’ and in that lose the sense of my beingness and the invaluable communication from my body.
It can feel sometimes like I am on a relentless treadmill of tasks that need to be done. But actually, given the fact that there is a continuous stream of activities that require my attention, this means that I can actually stop and rest and pick them all up again, because they will not stop being there, so I can be in authority of how I do what needs to be done and not the other way around.
Stopping can be really challenging, as when we stop we feel everything we have been living up to that stop moment. That’s not always that comfortable because we can feel the rush, push, drive, even if we have gone in the opposite direction and given up or checked out. Who wants to feel that? The important thing there, is it’s ok to feel all of that and more. There is nothing wrong with feeling any of that, in fact it is important to feel this. What’s more important is not to make a judgement on it, just observe and feel and nominate. Through stopping we offer our bodies moments to rest and return to ourselves. It’s a caring moment for our body. These then become the foundation of which we can build our day on feeling more rested, present with our body and much more solid in ourselves. It builds a quality that we can live the whole of our life in, still being productive and busy, but without it impacting on our well-being and our body.
We do not stop enough and breathe, breathe our own breath and stand still to feel where we are at. If we would, actually we are calling ourselves up for a change, a shift and deepening. We also would need less and less of those extreme stop moments where we can not but stop, forcefully so.. Why, if actually we didn’t truly in the first place need that ?
Love that “I actually do know how to stop, but I don’t put it into practice often enough.”. Very much a classic one because often we do know what we should do, what is a more loving or caring choice, but it is easier to just keep going in our old ways. Because if we put it in practice, it will show us things to work on and we have to deal with feeling amazing too! Sometimes when you identify with life being hard, this is the hardest one to deal with.
It can be challenging at times to bring yourself to a stop, but sometimes it is what is needed in order to bring about true quality to the job at hand.
Absolute gold for me this morning… and I ponder a question… can I stop in love for myself, free of the dependence on my self-worth being based on performance and achievement?
I recently stopped over the Christmas break and oh my goodness – it was incredible. I became so aware of so many things and how I operate in life. I’ve now committed to stopping more often to allow myself this grace, not only to rest and rejuvenate but also to reflect.
Stopping moments are essential, it is so easy to lose our connection and get caught up in doing or thinking.
It has come to a point where I am really starting to feel I can no longer override my body, which is such a blessing. Over the last week or so I have seen I have been very much a yes person in saying yes I can do lots of things but 1. am i discerning what I am saying yes to and 2. what is the quality I am doing tasks/etc in as if I say yes to everything. I can relate to a similar scenario as to what you share where there is a forever growing ‘to do’ list and I have put myself to one side of this. This is still very much a learning process for me in being fully committed to life but also taking deep care of myself as well. And it is even in the little things like last night while having my dinner (without a computer!) I found it really hard to just sit there and be with myself while having my dinner and not contact/message people on my phone etc .. seems to be the epidemic everywhere at the moment!
Taking the moment to stop and re-connect allows for true movement in our bodies, one which is free from impositions of life, confirming the divinity within ourslevs.
‘ I awoke with a renewed sense of care and love for myself and with a deep appreciation of taking the time to stop.’ That’s the beauty of taking care of our body. It will offer us the space that is naturally there, but we no longer feel when we push ourselves to keep on going.
If there is no self-love as part of our foundation, then the only time we stop is until we are given a correction whether that is through illness, accident or death. At the very core of our being we are all love, so it is true medicine to embrace that which is our natural right and stop to care and deeply appreciate who we are.
I’m appreciating how many stop moments and markers I have built into my days and how these are now simply part of what I do.
Beautiful Fiona. Caring ourselves is the most simple and natural thing we can do. This didn’t was my normal before I knew Universal Medicine but after all I’ve realized how enriching and joyful life can be when I make the choice of deeply caring myself.
I’ve forgotten recently how to stop and have found myself in the ‘I will just ….’ mode of operating and it feels horrible as my body tenses and I end up feeling utterly exhausted at the end of the day. Taking a stop moment brings us back to ourselves which means the quality of what we then do is then completely different.
Everything that we do comes down to alignment, we are either aligning to the consciousness of God with our movements or we are aligning to the consciousness of what is not God with our movements. A stop moment can be a precious moment where we re-align to the consciousness of God after ‘pushing through’ which is a movement of aligning to the consciousness of what is not God. Two camps, two consciousnesses, two types of movement, two types of alignment.
Yes self-appreciation is key otherwise we can easily drag our bodies through whatever we’ve chosen to do. Making life about quality rather than function…I love it!
I experience this joyfulness with quality based output too Sarah. Output without quality is a relentless and exhausting pushing and rushing throughout the day.
“I am learning that life is simply more joyful when I choose the quality in which I do something and that these choices about my quality are equally as important as my actual output”.
When we focus on what we are doing and bring our essence to it whatever we are doing gets transformed.
What a nightmare we create for ourselves with the attitude of the necessity to ‘keep going’ and push though the endless ‘to do’ list and overriding the wisdom of the body signals that are constantly being communicated to us. This leads to illness and disease in many forms if new choices are not made that support the body.
“I am learning how to be with my body and listen to the wisdom it shares quietly, taking the moments to stop and be with my body and to nourish it.”
The hardest thing can be to sit down on the couch and just do nothing for a minute or two, it is an incredible experience though, as it creates an instant deepening of the connection to how we feel in our body, and that can often be the feeling we have been trying to avoid.
Yes I can relate to the concept of ‘just keep going’ no matter what the body is sharing with you. Story of my life!! Resulting in adrenal fatigue and thyroid issues. I now have to take care of my body in a different way these days, I listen more to what it needs and honour that.
The thing is that when we stop to rest in honor of our bodies, we are not really ceasing to move, we are in fact still moving and working towards the task at hand, as we are moving in honor of love. Sometimes a moment of rest is part of the equation, of what is needed, in order to continue to deliver the quality of presence needed to honor the project or task we are working towards. Our bodies certainly do know in every moment what is needed to support us best. And so it makes sense to develop a loving relationship with our bodies so that we can bring our all to all that we do.
I can certainly learn something from this inspiring article, Sarah. It seems that our things to do list we draw up actually cause us to go on and on, while not feeling what needs to be done at each moment. This things-to-list comes from our head and is putting us in a drive to complete it, a drive that is actually harming the body.
It was like the hugest impossibility to have a nap in the afternoon one day when I felt tired, the impossibility came from an ideal in my head that says I can’t do that. But my body was asking me to rest and in the end I did, and when I woke up and looked myself in the mirror, oh gosh, have not felt and looked so intact for a while, the confirmation was in the living.
“Nowadays I am looking to bring in more stop moments – a loving work in progress because some days I still override the need to stop.” This is so wise Sarah. If we don’t choose to stop and rest when our body gives us small messages it can manifest in a deep exhaustion and maybe a more serious illness. There will always be ‘one more thing to do before’…….. Listening to our body and honouring what it is asking of us feels so important in this ‘keep busy’ age.
I love the simplicity shared here Sarah about stop moments, I have a stop moment programmed into my mobile everyday at a certain time. It is a beautiful reminder to pause and check in with myself and the quality in how I am moving that day, sometimes I ignore it because I am in the rush of the day, but your blog is inspiring me to commit more to this and to feel how supportive this simple act truly is.
For me when I am in this …’I just kept going. Just get this job done. Just tidy up the kitchen. Just send that email. Just put that load of washing on… and then I will stop.’ It just exposes the energy I am in and the energy I am moving in which is not from the a loving quality which I know I can be and move in. It is like re-training the whole body and way of being and going ‘no not that way but this way’ which is still very much work in progress for me.
Thank you, Sarah. This is a great reminder. I do know a stop, even just for a couple of minutes, taken at the moment the body is asking for is so rejuvenating – but have not been practicing it! I can feel the deep, residual exhaustion in my body.
If we embrace constant motion and then have a glass of wine and a cigarette, in truth we have not stopped even if may think so. What does truly mean to stop? Stop is not a moment of relief but a moment to truly come back to you.
Great blog Sarah – the true stop moment is being prepared to listen to the great wisdom the body offers consistently 24/7, rather than dismissing it and pushing through the tick box list to achieve something..
So true Stephanie – We certainly are missing out on moving with the fullness of the ‘big picture’ backing us when we dismiss the wisdom of our bodies.
Now that really is worthy of a song to truly… Stop… In the Name of Love.
I love this Sarah! I will love it even more when the day comes we can actually take the time we legitimately need in dedicated resting rooms in our workplaces. That will however require several levels of responsibility of a kind most of us aren’t yet ready for.
To be very honest, to choose to stop is something extremely unfamiliar in my body especially for work. So in all other areas in life I start to choose stop moments for myself, to begin to familarize my body in how that feels, and extend that into my work day. To be very honest, this has made a very big difference in my life as well as in my work. Stopping is allowing the body a moment to rest, it is equally focused and present, but physically the body requires rest and nourishment, so it is a deepening of care we put on ourselves. This makes so much sense of what the word deepening means.
When I need to stop and I have the feeling that I cant’ do it, it’s definitely the moment to stop and revise the quality in which I’m moving. When I stop in those moments, I usually find that the quality was not loving. This is the reason that makes the stop moments so essential during the day, because it is what allows me to change the quality and come back to the love everytime it’s needed.
It is so easy to get caught up in the business of the day and put off the stop moment, but when we do pay heed to the body’s calling we are given a greater awareness of how our body is truly feeling in that loving moment.
I like the sound of stopping but stopping in the name of love and purpose, even better.
It is so lovely when we do give our selves the ‘ok’ to stop. This is incredibly essential for our well-being and also opens up the awareness to why we might think that stopping isn’t ok, even when every part of our body knows that that is the true choice in the moment.