Stillness to me is not lack of movement, it is not quiet nor quiet mind. Everything in Creation vibrates—every thing is in motion—every vibration translates to sound and light. Stillness then, is a sort of restraint, whether willful or not, depending on the relationship you have with yourself—that part that is commonly trained in this society with a compulsion to urgently make things happen or not happen—a restraint from pushing process. Stillness is Being—alive, optimally calm and alert and ready to respond flexibly to whatever is happening in the moment—appropriately attuned. Just following the energy and discerning what needs your attention, or not, with intention. And sometimes maybe you might intend to not intend and go deeper into simple experience, just to feel your senses.
Meditation is not what you think it is—if you think it is to aim to achieve some state of experience that looks like something you are not experiencing right now, or do not want to experience— that looks like some version of stillness the overculture tells you what peace looks like: sitting on a cushion, eyes closed, statuesque, “still”, “quiet” mind (there’s no such thing—and how dull would life be if everyone strived and achieved blank mindedness! Lol)—completely dissociated from aliveness! Perhaps this approach is useful for someone choosing to live remotely in a far off mountain in a monastery, renouncing all the things that make up life. But there is another way for those of us who are in our lives, and all the things that might come into our space as turbulence. It’s a process:
The meditation lives within you. Naturally. Your very own personhood is the portal. Love what you love, love what you don’t love (if it is for you to transmute with radical kindness and radical acceptance).. peace is the natural outcome of this process of growing your capacity to attend and attune with intention through your body’s inherent capacity for connection to wholeness, to heart and spirit—a kind of stillness of Being—alive, ecstatic, supported and rooted through your body and anything or anyone or any spirit you can call in to support that.
Once I was able to disengage all the “rules” that really just take you in the direction of dissociation that will never ground you into a place of feeling internally supported, was I finally able to feel equanimity, peace, and vitality emerge from my own process—the peace is in your ability to root, and your body, your instrument of sensing, is already an expression of root. When we are rooted, we have more satisfying access to the expansiveness of spirit.
Cats: I have a friend who says they meditate us. 💗😻