The 2 Phases of the Manifestor Rest Cycle
If you have been aware of your ‘Manifestor’ title for any length of time, chances are you have come across some information on the Manifestor energy cycles. As non Sacrals, we Manifestors tend to need a lot of rest. Our energy is not designed to keep up with the Sacrals of the world (the Generators and Manifesting Generators), but even with an awareness of this, many Manifestors continue to struggle with fatigue. Why?
The short answer is: the Rest Cycle.
Unlike our Projector and Reflector friends, the Manifestor need for rest goes beyond being non Sacral and requires more than daily management with naps. For a Manifestor, the Rest Cycle is an integral part of the energetic process of being an ‘initiator’ and comes as the necessary precursor to the Creative Cycle where our urges come to life ready to be initiated.
Deep Rest Cycles are a natural part of the Manifestor existence, but unfortunately are often responded to with criticism from others. After all, how can a person rest for months on end, only to then come back to life in a flurry and create something entirely new? For Manifestors, this is entirely normal.
A Rest Cycle can truly feel like you’re losing your mind, losing yourself and losing any grasp on reality. We can feel a sense that we are losing any ability to be normal, to know what is coming or to know what is happening. Deep Rest Cycles are often made harder still when our old triggered behaviours come up, demanding us to focus on the inner work.
Knowing that the Rest Cycles are a tough journey is only one part of the equation though. The remainder is understanding how they operate so you can gain the most expansion from them. Long Rest Cycles can be a beautiful experience when we can learn from them.
First things first – did you know the Rest Cycle is divided into two distinct phases? Yep, it’s true.
THE REST CYCLE: PHASE 1
The first thing you notice about the Rest Cycle’s arrival? Fatigue. Welcome to Phase 1.
This phase is quite straightforward – it is a deep physical recuperation from whatever you have just initiated. It is a state of physical debilitation. We need a lot of sleep. We tend to eat a lot of carbohydrates. We sometimes can’t physically get up. Bed becomes your new home.
Those first few days can feel remarkably similar to illness. You know the feeling right before you get hit with the flu? When your body is inexplicably tired and sore, being pulled right down into a deep restoration and sleep. This is the same feeling of Phase 1.
It can be intense, certainly, but blessedly, it is also the shortest part of the Rest Cycle, often lasting only a few days to a week.
THE REST CYCLE: PHASE 2
Phase two of the Rest Cycle is the bigger part. It is also the more challenging part.
Phase 2 is unpredictable. It can be a week, two weeks, a month, two months, six months or even a year. We don’t know how long it’s going to last for because
we don’t actually know what’s coming. Which is important to note, because the mechanical function of Phase 2 is not the same as Phase 1. We have already had our recovery in Phase 1, so now we are energetically making space for our next Creative Urge and Creative Cycle.
Phase 2 is all about creating a vacuum so the new urge can come through when it is ready.
This phase is arguably the most pivotal, crucial and valuable time of your entire existence as a Manifestor. Because if you are not allowing yourself to make space for what is coming, you don’t have the energy available to initiate it when it arrives. You don’t get to fully birth the urge that was meant to be coming for you. I believe knowing this allows us to give ourselves self validation and self love during these deep Rest Cycles, because we can reassure ourselves that the longer it is the bigger the thing will be that you’re initiating on the other side, right? It’s not for nothing. It’s an investment phase.
There is a state of perpetual fatigue that goes with Phase Two of the Rest Cycle. Part of it is physical fatigue. We do have a low lying, but consistent feeling of tiredness where it doesn’t matter how much you sleep, you still feel tired. It doesn’t matter how much activity you have done or not done, you still feel tired. But certainly if you do a lot of activity, you’re going to feel really, really tired. It’s where the activities of just day by day life suddenly feel like an endurance race. Getting up, getting dressed, making decisions about what food you want to eat and what you want your schedule to look like for the day. All of those things become challenging because they’re really energy draining.
That fatigue can become debilitating and often concerning. Thousands of Manifestors have been misdiagnosed with chronic illnesses when they are simply experiencing the mystery of a long Rest Cycle. You are not fully yourself, but also not fully unable to function.
It is as though our tank is very low and any activity depletes that level of energy quickly. Your Manifestor energy is saying, ‘I’m not giving you more energy because if you take more energy, you will hustle again. I want you to pull down. I want you to listen to this. I want you to pay attention. I want you to stop.’
That, my Manifestor friends, is the valuable lesson of the fatigue.
Which is where the challenge truly lies. What happens when life continues around you, but you are only operating at 50% for months on end? I personally am a mother and I still need to parent my kids. So I can’t float into nothingness.
What does this mean for me when I need to rest?
What does this mean for all Manifestors?
Do we need to just drop things, even though we feel like they are important?
These are the questions you need to navigate through as you feel the Rest Cycle happening.
RESISTING THE REST CYCLE
Of course, fatigue in the Rest Cycle is worsened by your resistance to it. And I’m not even just talking about physical resistance. It’s very easy for us to physically resist and just push through. Running errands, exercising intensely, getting a few hours of work done. Even socialising.
By resisting, we are pushing ourselves into further fatigue. It creates a white noise in your energy, a sort of constant friction and agitation. Continue to resist and you will soon find that you are angry.
This anger could be at yourself, at other people, at the Rest Cycle, at the whole world or it could even be all of these things. Why? The Not Self theme for Manifestors is anger. It indicates that we are out of alignment. Your refusal to rest is taking you away from your peace and your alignment.
REFLECTION ON THE REST CYCLE
The most important aspect of the Rest Cycle is reflection. This is written about in so much traditional Human Design teaching but is unfortunately glossed over. The general rhetoric is: It’s just a time of restoration and reflection.
But is it?
What does that mean? What does it mean to reflect? Are we reflecting on what we created? Not usually because by the time we’re going into the Rest Cycle, we’re disconnected from it. We don’t want to think about it. We don’t want to reflect on it. There’s nothing else left in that for us anymore. The tether has been cut. So what are we reflecting on?
Are we reflecting on the thing that’s coming up that we can’t yet see or feel yet? How can we reflect on something when we don’t even know what it is yet?
We can’t connect to it because we’re not ready to, we haven’t created the space yet. So what we are connecting to, and what we’re reflecting on is this messiness that is happening right now. This messiness that is happening in the
present phase. Phase Two of your Rest Cycle is the only true time for a Manifestor to be almost forced into a four walled energetic room where everything that you have been able to ignore in the hype of the Creation Cycle (and have been too tired to acknowledge in Phase One of the Rest Cycle) now gets noisier and more present. This will be things like your beliefs, your limiting beliefs, your fears, the patterns, the schedules, the structures, the narratives that you have been in that are not serving you. All the energetic frequencies that are blocking you. It will be your emotions that you have been trying to shove down.
It will be all of these things that will ultimately heal you and push you forward and expand you in the next Creative Cycle. But you have got to go through the muck. You must reflect, acknowledge, experience it all and then transmute that through healing into an asset, a lesson and a growth.
This accounts for so much of why Phase Two of the Rest Cycle can be torture. It is self confronting, with no way out. Remember, we don’t know how long Phase Two is going to last. So if you are in a very, very prolonged phase that has been going on for months or in some cases, even years, it can feel relentless. It can feel like you are in a cage of your own making and the pressure on you to do the inner work can feel like the heaviest burden you have ever carried.
But it does have purpose. It has so much purpose. This is the deepest you will ever go. It is probably one of the reasons why Manifestors can’t just do quick cycles. We have to acknowledge and transmute this energy in order to be more powerful when we step into our next initiation.
This blog post is really a love note for every other Manifestor who is going through the Rest Cycle right now.
This is hard. It is hard not having a body or a brain that is functioning like it would normally. It is hard waking up every day and feeling tired. It is hard not being able to do the things that we would normally do. It is hard not being able to initiate anything, right? We struggle to even know what to make for dinner. Any initiation is just overwhelmingly difficult. And we live in a world that is not accommodating for that. It wants us to be consistent. It wants us to be present. It wants us to always be able to initiate, always be able to step up, always be able to respond. And in a deep Rest Cycle, we just aren’t. We just can’t do that. And so there is a tug of war that goes on.
So I’m sending you so much love if that’s you right now and reminding you that you can do this. This is happening for you, not to you. How can you lay yourself back and surrender to this?
