How Much Stillness is There in your Life?

“The sacred dimension is not something
that you can know through words and ideas
any more than you can learn what an apple pie tastes like
by eating the recipe.

The modern age has forgotten that facts and information,
for all their usefulness, are not the same as truth or wisdom,
and certainly not the same as direct experience.

We have lost touch with the intuitive wisdom
born of silence and stillness.”

~Adyashanti

Whenever anyone asks me how to best navigate their angst, worry, confusion, overwhelm, dissatisfaction or any other constricted state of being, I often ask…

“How much stillness is there in your life?”

 Almost always the response is some form of, “Not nearly enough.”

We know intuitively that the way to our deepest knowing that helps us to best navigate our life does not lead through the mind.

It is a path that leads beyond where the mind can follow.

When people imagine more stillness in their lives, they typically experience some amount of immediate ease.

Try it, see if just the imagining of more space and stillness in your life brings more peace.

We intuitively crave coming back home to the embrace of stillness. But we have lost trust in it.

The addiction to figuring our way out of our suffering with the mind is strong and it has a lifetime of practice behind it.

But all addictions offer false and temporary comfort and ultimately constrain our experience.

Stillness offers a vast frontier into which most haven’t even taken more than a few tentative steps

And yet, it is a frontier that offers more abundance of life than the mind can ever imagine.

This frontier is available to every one of us at any time, because it is the vast frontier within which everything that exists is manifest.

All noise arises from and returns to silence.

All activity arises from and returns to stillness.

All complication arises from and returns to simplicity.

Our own conditioned and constrained state of being arises from and returns to its infinite nature.

We needn’t wait for this human experience to end before we return home.