Imagine a spinning top. Stillness is like a perfectly centered top, spinning so fast it appears motionless. It appears this way not because it isn’t moving, but because it’s spinning at full speed.
Stillness is not the absence or negation of energy, life or movement. Stillness is dynamic. It is unconflicted movement, life in harmony with itself, skill in action. It can be experienced whenever there is total, uninhibited, unconflicted participation in the moment you are in – when you are wholeheartedly present with whatever you are doing.
For most of us, however, most of the time, our lives do not resemble a perfectly centered top, spinning so fast it appears motionless. Our lives are more like a top in a somewhat wild, erratic, and chaotic spin. We know we’re alive because at least we’re still spinning, but we are not quite perfectly centered, and we are not spinning anywhere near full speed. We don’t have as much energy as we’d like, we are not experiencing as much aliveness as we might, nor are we experiencing the peace of stillness or the joy of being.
Stillness, therefore, is a higher energy state than what we’re used to. This is because we are rarely wholehearted, or unconflicted, about anything. When you are not wholehearted, when you’d rather be someplace other than where you are, parts of you shut down and begin not to participate. Your energy circulation becomes constricted, and the creative life force is unable to flow through you unimpeded. Your energy flow, the amount of life force flowing through you, begins to diminish. The source of energy does not diminish, but the amount that flows through you does. This leads to ill health, low energy, lowered vitality, lack of enthusiasm, depression, frustration, unhappiness, and suffering. None of this feels good.
When you are wholehearted about something, however, when you are where you want to be and are participating fully in the moment you are in – sometimes enthusiastic, sometimes mellow – you will experience a new sense of aliveness. You will experience a surge of energy, renewed vigor. This is not because there is actually an increase in energy, but because you are not constricting it quite so much. There is now a better energy flow. There is less conflict, less friction, less not wanting to be where you are, and therefore – for you – there will be the experience of more energy.
This occurs whenever you are not attempting to spin clockwise and counterclockwise simultaneously. Spinning in opposite directions happens hen you act on opposing desires, when you are conflicted about what you are doing, not wholehearted – granted this is most of the time. Stillness happens when you relax inside and are in harmony with yourself.
This is the point: When you experience yourself in stillness – that is, when you give your undivided attention to experiencing the truth about you – you will experience the conflict – free, clam, dynamic peace of perfectly centered abundant life energy. This exquisite peace deep within you as you. It’s how God is experiencing Himself – Herself now and always. It is the phenomenological feeling – tone of Being, or Existence and it is the truest thing about who you are. When you experience the peace within you, you will spontaneously undergo a fundamental transformation in the way you think about yourself and how you see the world. Nothing will seem quiet the same ever again.
From: Yoga. The Spirit and Practice of Moving Into Stillness. Erich Schiffmann. Pocket Books a division of Simon & Schuster, Inc. New York, N.Y., 10020, 1996. ISBN. 0-671-53480-7 (pb).
