Weekly Letter: To unbury the stillness

Awhile back I wrote about the author Maggie Smith and how she described growth of a person to be more like rings in a tree, than something a person ‘sheds’ and leaves behind. Her take, is that the people we were are always with us, but we’ve built this new epidermis and each time we grow, we add a layer. The people we were are always with us, even if we are not them anymore.

I found this idea at the time to be very comforting and I still do today. I don’t need to be the previous versions of myself, but I appreciate the things I learned from her then and how those experiences shaped me for today.

Yoga teacher, Erich Schiffmann wrote about how we all have stillness inside of us. It’s present, available, but what we do (especially in modern time) is bury it with everything else. All the tasks, lists and expectations get piled on top and then the person goes to yoga because it’s been so long since they’ve seen it, they don’t know how to access it anymore.

The truth it, it’s there the whole time. Stillness isn’t something you go out and buy. It’s something you unbury from deep within. Paying attention to breath is the first step to begin the process of accessing stillness. He goes on to say, that stillness isn’t necessarily quiet. We act as though the perfect meditation is to have a still mind, but the act of meditation is to find that stillness inside of the noise. The eye of a tornado would be a better analogy.

What do you think about that?