Finding Stillness

When we retreat from our busy lives and sit with ourselves in solitude, at first it’s challenging to turn off our mechanical monkey mind and its incessant chatter.

However, just one short experience of stillness is like a taste of honey: we want to experience more and more of it. In time, the frequency and length of our periods of stillness increase.

How does one find inner stillness?

We don’t find inner stillness through analyzing the past or attempting to influence the future. We find stillness only in the Now, and only to the degree that our mental chatter subsides. 

Finding inner stillness requires our intention to do so. Following this intention, we will do what comes naturally to discover this priceless treasure.

Predictably, we will at first set aside time to sit in silence and solitude. We only need sit and do nothing, letting everything settle down, much like stirred particles in a glass of unfiltered apple juice settle to the bottom when we simply let the glass sit.

Stillness will naturally take us into inner body awareness, which we will want to cultivate so that it intensifies.

After our thoughts and our emotions settle down, we find ourselves becoming sensitive to the aliveness within our body. This is a sign that we are becoming aware of our own animating presence.

At first a sense of the aliveness within our body may appear faint and diffuse. But as we continue to hold our attention inside our body, this sense of aliveness intensifies and we start feeling the energy within it. The sensation may begin in our hands and feet, then continue up our arms and legs.

As we continue in our sitting practice, we will come to experience the whole body as alive with energy.

This energy – or what we have come to call the “inner body” –  isn’t in itself the divine presence, but is the effect of this presence in our bodily form.

Our body is animated by consciousness.

Paradoxically, to find our true self, we need to enter the body to know we are vastly more than our body – that our body is simply the temporarily alive form that manifests what has traditionally been called our “spirit,” or what we would call in more modern terminology our “consciousness.” Spirit is consciousness – awareness, inner knowing.

This is why the body loves it when we bring attention to our inner body – when we become aware of the energetic manifestation of consciousness within our body. Indeed, when we put our attention on the energy within us and appreciate it, our body tends to respond by becoming healthier.

When our energy is blocked because of the effect of unconscious behavior, the body cannot function in a fully integrated manner. In contrast, when energy flows freely to all our cells and tissues, the body’s many systems operate in an integrated way. Perhaps one of the best things we can do to improve our health is to practice inner body awareness.

We have been told that God is closer to us than our hands and feet. This is because the Presence that’s the source of our aliveness – the spring from which our inner body energy flows – is more “us” than our physical form is “us.” In fact, it’s the expression of our own presence.

What enables the beauty of a bird’s song that bursts so freely from its little body? The life within it makes the song. So does the life within us thrill and dance through every vein, cell, and atom of our being.

When we recognize the all-perfect power of the life within us, feeling it in every part of our body, honoring it in humble stillness, it has positive benefits for our physical body. Often disease and weakness dissolve in its life-giving power.

Opportunity for Self-inquiry and Sharing:

A.    Can you recall a time when you became aware that your energy was blocked because of unconsciousness? How did it feel?

B.    How did becoming conscious in this aspect of your life impact your physical body?

Comment: If we continue with this practice of inner body awareness, there comes a time when we go beyond the sensation of the inner body, the animating force within, to a state of pure no-thing-ness. This is true stillness – the silent force of our Source.  It emanates from who we truly are.   

We start in stillness, which takes us first into the inner body, then beyond it to the deepest stillness that’s beyond any sensation. Here we find only peace – and come to know ourselves as one with the Presence that exudes this peace.

Can we continue in our practice of stillness until, no matter what we encounter in the outside world, we can hold to stillness and bring this into all we do and experience?

This ends Section 3

The next section will be posted on Monday, April 5