Bombarded as we are by the news, by our life-necessities, work and more, coming to stillness is needed more than ever. Often, we do not allow ourselves the opportunity for stillness because when we stop our busyness what we have avoided knowing and feeling shows up in spades. To cultivate being in stillness we must trust deeper levels of our being. Growing into stillness takes commitment and time and the paradox is that in it we are gifted with timelessness.
Phrases posted on Facebook May 2025
Here’s a stillness story in three parts. It happened when I was in my twenties, a counselor in a church camp one summer and six months pregnant. A Japanese counselor who was also there offered to teach me meditation. I was intrigued and accepted the offer. He took me to the lake and told me to sit in the water up to just below my nostrils. It seemed odd but I was game and did it. Then he told me to quiet my body and refine my breath so that I would not ruffle the surface of the water. It took some time to be that still.
It was late afternoon when a kind of quiet naturally happens in nature. The lake was motionless and reflective like a mirror. No birds were in flight. My friend and I were immobile not unlike two frogs at the water’s edge. I lost all sense of being separate. Everything simply was individual ad yet one. AAH the stillness.
Those of us who have experienced moments of having our separate self-sense dissolve and merging with the whole know what a gift that experience is because it is not something we can “make happen”. Usually, it lasts only a little while which is what happened to me in that lake meditation. Then my baby kicked inside my womb with gusto and the mirror water reverberated. I returned to ordinary time and its demands. What could I do but laugh? Maybe my unborn baby laughed, too. I felt new in some wonderful way. Stillness does deeply “renew” us.
Simone Weil, French activist and mystic, said that attention is prayer. I think attention is the precursor to being able to be still. If we can be completely present without the need to judge or intervene, we are paying attention and that takes us more surely into stillness where real insight and change can emerge.
Mostly we don’t realize that the inner sanctum where stillness dwells does not belong to us. We belong to it. Being able to abide in that spacious stillness brings us beyond words and beyond any sense of unworthiness. It is pure gift.
“Wisdom comes with the ability to be still. Just look and just listen. No more is needed.” Eckhart Tolle
We know that in the eye of some storms there is stillness, a center of calm.
When we feel stormy, I wonder if we might seek that center and let things blow over as much as possible. It is then we will see more coherently with the eye of inner calm and our practical eyes in tandem.
To be still is to cease activity, yes, but it is more. It is to cease needing to be in charge. It’s giving up being number one. Then we can find we are much more than our little busy, self-important personalities. Curiously that is an expansion, no a contraction.
There are times in stillness that we are given everything and nothing is taken from us. It is a generosity beyond comprehension. Those times may be rare but they seem to last a lifetime.
Stillness is not numbness, nor defeat or a sense of disengagement, although all those feelings may arise when we stop being busy. In stillness we enter pure being (without adjectives). Stillness is dynamic, and in it we can feel that “a force” is with us.
Stillness unites tic tock time and eternal time. In stillness moments we can be aware of that simultaneity which is ongoing whether we pay attention or not. We are always in both. Being aware of both can change how we live profoundly.
Perhaps a mirror could be a good image for stillness. On its surface whatever is near it is reflected, but the mirror itself is not affected by anything passing by it. It simply is. And that is the I Am that we also are.
