Stillness

A while ago we received an email from someone who’d only been meditating with us for a few weeks.

They wrote: ‘I have been amazed. In such a short time, I have a completely new relationship with my thoughts. I’ve had this anxiety following a cancer diagnosis which reared up stuff already there. But after meditating for a few weeks, I began to understand how thoughts come and go and it’s about how you react to them that affects you. I can’t tell you how wonderful it is. I’ve moved into a space of freedom.’

Meditation as stopping, not escaping

Meditation is not a technique that takes you somewhere else. It is a path that helps you stop, right where you are. It interrupts the momentum of the mind. It invites you to be still enough to see what has always been true, right here.

At first, this work of stilling can seem uneventful, even uncomfortable. We are so used to movement, thoughts, emotions, problems to solve – associating visible busyness with progress, doing something positive – that becoming still, becoming silent, can initially feel like entering some sort of absence, not doing anything much at all.

But something begins to happen when we let the silence be, when we let ourselves simply be in the silence, when we stop chasing the next moment and allow ourselves to settle into this one. There is no concept to grasp, no image to generate and hold. We simply practice being present. Slowly, over time, what might appear to the busy, chattering mind as emptiness, begins to reveal itself as fullness. What might seem at first like nothing, becomes radiant. As the person who emailed put it, ‘Joy, too, has begun to bubble up, for no apparent reason. There wasn’t a lot of joy at home growing up. But now, it just comes.’

Stillness as freedom

Stilling the mind unveils what is deeper than thought. It opens us to the mystery of pure awareness — consciousness without any shape or story. This is not something we create. It is what we return to when we stop trying to be anything in particular, or feel this or that. And yet, as much as we long for this, the process of return can feel daunting at first. Because stillness doesn’t just slow us down, it unravels us. It loosens the patterns we might have habitually followed, the structures we’ve built to hold ourselves together in a certain shape, our names, roles and designations, the various images we use to imagine who we are. To practice becoming still, is to come face to face with what is real beneath all this. This unravelling process is not destructive. It is God’s gentle work of undoing what might need undoing so that we may live more simply in God’s presence, in the presence of those around us, with greater freedom, with greater peace.

Resistance and release

At first, almost all of us will face a certain amount of resistance. It takes time to learn how to release, to surrender. In meditation, as we step back from the thoughts and images that arise within us moment by moment, as we step away from the chatter and noise of our mind, what we discover is not an absence of anything, but a boundless fullness holding us and everything. For us to become more aware of the person next to us, of the tree, of the bird singing, we must learn to lift our attention off our mental noise, off ourselves, and become self-forgetful, become open. To paraphrase St John the Baptist, for God to increase in our awareness, we must decrease (John 3:30).

The gift of silence in prayer

In her book, Upon this Mountain, the Carmelite nun Mary McCormack beautifully describes the process of stilling, releasing and opening.(1) ‘It may happen during prayer,’ she writes, ‘or even when we are engaged in our everyday activities, that a sudden hush falls upon us, an involuntary silencing of thought, as the mind’s powers are caught and held in an inexplicable sense of presence. It does not last long and cannot be recaptured at will, but it is usually the prelude to a simplification of our prayer. Prayer gradually becomes characterised by the ability to rest peacefully in a loving sense of God’s presence, without desiring anything else. Words and ideas give way to silent communion.’

Notice her insistence that the silencing of the mind busy mind, the sense of presence we might experience, ‘cannot be recaptured.’ We cannot grasp it. There is no need to try and get hold of it. It holds us. It is God’s presence.

Discovering God’s presence within

In meditation, we turn, we open, to that which is so close, so intimate, that to look for it (to have any thought about what it might look or feel like) is to overlook it. ‘When we learn to stop struggling to recover what we feel we have lost,’ says McCormack, ‘we will begin to be aware of the startling simplicity and immediacy of God’s oneness with us.’ Our practice is a path of self-forgetfulness. Letting go of our thoughts and images in meditation, we learn to trust, to ‘walk by faith [trust] and not by sight’ (2 Cor 5:7).

The person who emailed us also spoke of discovering a very different relationship with God. ‘I feel safe in a way I didn’t before,’ she said. ‘It’s not about being good enough or saying the right things. I’m not walking a tightrope anymore. It’s simpler now. God is in me, and I’m in God.’

Little by little, without us knowing how, the time we give to meditation, to stilling the mind, to being silent, helps us awaken within the stillness, the silence, which is God’s presence, the infinite, unchanging ocean of love which is our home.