What is rest and how do you achieve it? How does our body feel when it is recuperating and when do we know when it has recovered? These are the things that you need to be aware of when building your body and the only way to know when you're resting when you're recuperating or any of these things is to know when your body or your muscle are tense or activated or stressed. So to know how to rest you must first know how to assess your body and see what is resting and what is active what is overly active? What is fighting and what is that tension?
which brings us back to awareness so now that you have a new level of understanding through practice, you can go back to the lesson of awareness with a new understand so you can go back to day one or day two and revisit that lesson and for further expand upon it here, but you can read that again with a higher level of understanding so anyway back to awareness.
because at this point, you know what it feels like to reach your max capacity of something, and you had the practice of going to reaching your max capacity. You should now be aware of what it feels like for a muscle to hold tension and a muscle to hold no tension, and the differences between a muscle that is locked in tension and a muscle that is not being stimulated enough and if that's not something that you understand right now it is something that will be more unveiled in the lessons ahead but the main point is that in order for your muscles to relax there needs to be room for the muscle to relax within its range or domain or capacity.
shortness tension in your muscles cause other muscles to take over and compensate for the stress or the lack of ability in that muscle because of all of the tension that you're holding it's so as one muscle becomes useless due to the atrophy, the lack of activity, or use of that muscle or pathway now you have another one in your body constrict itself, and upon constricting itself, it creates new pathways for you to try to maintain the function. so what you end up with is those paths locked in place, locked in continual activity, and this low activity or this automatic activity layers up on and as it layers and layers, you start to feel the consequences of lack of energy, exhaustion, limited range of motion, and your muscles can never really fully rest because They don't have the space to, they're limited, they're stuck.
so as you've practiced and do more of the practices ahead, you will start to become aware of what is required in order to free your muscles of their limited range so that you can enjoy their fullness and feel when they are at a level where they can be at rest. Because all of your ability to rest and recover and recuperate, your muscles all depends on the flowability of that muscle.
For example, you have an old injury or a torn ligament or a sprain that doesn't heal fully. it heals but you notice you have limited range in that area or stiffness overtime. The reason that you have limited range of motion overtime is because as you healed you created new pathways of motion to avoid pain and supplement balance. However those new paths stop you from utilizing those true paths so you adapt and the feeling is cut off from those older paths and resisted and new paths form but the older paths lack of motion and activity create stiffness and the injury build scar tissue.
Learning what it takes to reopen and reactivate and realign that pathway is the key to being able to recover fully and allow your body to rest. When you let go of tension, ease sets in, exhaustion releases, energy can flow.