It’s not sleep, nor meditation, but the effects can be as profound as a holiday. Rebecca Barry Hill goes in search of ‘deep rest’.
One recent Friday, my doctor took my blood pressure, and his eyebrows shot up. “It’s probably genetic,” he assured me, “but it wouldn’t hurt to cut
While it was tempting to blame hypertension on my parents, or bacon, I couldn’t help but think back to the weeks that had been, the collision of deadlines, one of said parents receiving a more serious diagnosis, my 5-year-old’s behaviour turning teenaged overnight, the hours spent on screens, excess caffeine and adrenaline-fuelled boxing classes. On the weekends, I still made the bed with the maniacal energy of someone desperately racing the clock.
If you’d told me then that the balm to this constant feeling of high alert would be lying in a dim room surrounded by strangers as someone tucked me in like a child with a heavy wool blanket and a hot water bottle, I wouldn’t have believed you.
Once upon a time, neither would Sharon Kempthorne.
“I used to go for a weekly massage and I’d spend the entire hour on the table ruminating about what needed to get done in my life,” says the corporate escapee turned restorative therapeutics teacher, who runs her business from Cambridge.
“If I glimpsed five minutes at the end of the massage of relaxing into it, that was an absolute miracle. So I wanted to find practices that created a really lasting effect.”
Leaving behind her corporate career in senior human resources as the global financial crisis took hold, Sharon travelled the world training in scientifically backed ways of nurturing calm, from yoga to Ayurveda, traditional Chinese medicine and meditation, namely a modern version founded by American psychologist Richard Miller called iRest, which is used by members of the US military to deal with post-traumatic stress.
Through her own experiences, she knew it wasn’t just those on the front line of war zones who needed help down-regulating their dominant sympathetic nervous systems. Referring to Dr Saundra Dalton-Smith, a psychologist who has identified the seven types of rest we all need (whether it’s mental, emotional or spiritual, and quite separate from sleep), Sharon has designed a multisensory process through which she guides practitioners into a deep state of stillness and healing.
“There is such a need to proactively approach how we can more sustainably juggle all the areas of our life from a calm and rested state,” says Sharon. “People are tired and burnout is real.”
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Advertise with NZME.In person, she walks the talk, exuding such a perceptible level of calm, it’s not uncommon for people who meet her to tell her they want what she’s having.
One of those people is her hair stylist, Belinda Robb, who says she became so intrigued by Sharon’s presence whenever she came to her Birkenhead salon, Biba, she soon invited her to provide regular restorative retreats, using her studio as a base. Tonight, what is usually a busy salon filled with whirring hair dryers and talking has been transformed into a candlelit sanctuary, the smell of exotic oils in the air, ethereal music playing, a large gong glinting in the half-light. Belinda is here too, eager to take what she’s come to call a two-hour “magic carpet ride”.
It’s just past 6pm, and the part of my mind that would normally be looking forward to stillness on the couch, tuning out to Netflix following the kids-bedtime slump, starts to chorus loudly in my head: why would people pay to lie down in the dark somewhere that’s not their bedroom? Aren’t I better off having a stiff drink? What if I start snoring?
The point of resting in a waking state is to get in touch with the wisdom of our bodies, Sharon explains. Many of us have become so disconnected from our physical selves, we’re not always willing, or capable, of hearing their messages, communicated via muscle tension, shallow breathing, stiffness or pain. Look at the animal kingdom, she adds. Lions don’t spend hours of their day in pursuit of food. Throughout the day, once they’ve achieved what they need to survive, they rest, something human bodies need, too.
As we lie back, lavender-scented masks over our eyes, bolsters beneath our knees, Sharon ensures the pile of blankets we’ve each been provided envelops us in a cocoon, buffering any stretches from going too deep, and warming us from head to toe. Then she guides us through a sequence of yoga-based resting poses, starting with savasana, before slowly, mindfully, we manoeuvre into reclining postures: child’s pose, “mother pose” (feet together, knees wide), and simple breathing exercises designed to stimulate the vagus nerve, the CEO of our parasympathetic nervous systems.
When it comes to relaxation, our bodies need time, says Sharon, hence the importance of investing it in this “liminal space” between waking and sleep. After a while the mental chatter dissolves and I find stillness lying in mother pose, the music transporting me to another plane as Sharon invites us to rub aromatic oils into our skin, the heightened pleasure from the aromatherapy designed to emphasise that somatic connection.
Finally, we experience a “sound bath”. This immersive, ultra-relaxing practice is both heard and felt in the body, via reverberating, vibrational frequencies attuned to different energy centres in the body. Its roots go back as far as the Ancient Greek philosopher Pythagoras, who recognised the healing qualities of sound. Sharon creates this distinctive music by rolling a tuning fork around the outside of four crystal quartz bowls, harmonising with differing tones, followed by a few hits of the gong. Regardless of what you make of vibrations affecting chakras, it’s moody and awe-inspiring and feels as though someone’s reached into my skull to massage my brain.
As everyone stretches out of a blissful two hours of relaxation for chai tea and tahini balls (an insurance policy against anyone driving home feeling a little too sleepy), I spy the notepad and pen that have lain untouched at the foot of my blankets. I’d put them there in case I felt the need to scribble down thoughts, but with most mental noise soon sublimated by dreamy bodily sensations, I realise the key to this experience has actually been to get out of my head. Also, my handwriting would have been appalling.
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Advertise with NZME.That night, I sleep deeply, the micro pauses between cycles punctuated by a feeling of lightness, and wake fully refreshed at 5.30am, a good hour earlier than usual. I’m amazed to find that a newfound sensation of mental and physical “softening” stays with me throughout the week.
Sharon explains that when the body and mind are given the opportunity to switch on the parasympathetic nervous system, the effects can be profound, lingering for days.
“When we lead a busy life, the mind happily puts itself in charge and the body follows,” she says. “With the speed of life and the rate of technology around us, we disconnect even further from that innate knowledge and wisdom that our body has, its ability to do that on its own. So the practices I offer are about building resilience, getting back in touch with that rest and repair response.”
She acknowledges that not everyone has the time or means to go on a retreat, and while we could do these restful practices at home, they’re not always places we consider a sanctuary. Often they’re spaces we associate with noise and family and clutter and housework, whereas the retreat environment strips all that away, tending to the sensory details designed to make the body feel safe, whether it’s the warmth of a hot water bottle, or blankets tucked snuggly beneath the knees.
This sense of safety is vital, says Sharon, as many of those who come to her retreats have been through trauma, are recovering from surgery or illness, hormonal imbalance or injury.
“This is about having people experience what exists in them already,” she explains. “Because we were born knowing how to relax. As babies, as young children, we knew how to switch on and switch off. And as adults, and I’m generalising here, we tend to be more sympathetically dominant in our nervous system, which is the fight, flight, freeze response, than we are relaxed, which is the parasympathetic rest, repair, digest response. And then on top of that, we have lifestyles where we feed ourselves caffeine or sugar or alcohol as ways to reward or cope with what’s going on.”
Drifting back to reality with this newfound sense of groundedness, I vow to reframe my preconceptions of relaxation as an indulgence and commit to practising a little — even just two or three deep belly breaths — every day. My blood pressure depends on it.
Biba Salon in Birkenhead is hosting half-day and two-hour Soulful Stillness sessions with Sharon Kempthorne on August 13, September 10, October 15 and November 19. Sharon also offers one-on-one sessions in Auckland, Cambridge and the wider Waikato area. Numbers are limited. For bookings, visit Sharonkempthorne.com
