We began this series around the practice and routine of silence.
The art of stillness and all other practices begin with a return to the silence and stillness from which we came.
The silence and stillness that is our very essence.
We began our first session with an introduction to silence and stillness.
Followed by discovering stillness.
The foundational practice of observing three minutes of silence first thing in the morning and then three minutes at the end of each day.
In our third session,
Practicing silence,
We grew our daily practice to ten minutes of silence in the morning and ten minutes of silence in the evening.
This alone is a beautiful practice and if you stayed with it this far,
You have cultivated the practice of observing silence for twenty minutes out of an entire day.
Just imagine the effect it might have if everyone simply paused for twenty minutes out of each day and returned to silence.
Finally,
In our next session on cultivating space,
You were invited to cultivate a sacred and personal space of your very own to return to each day for your silence practice.
Each session slowly builds upon the session before and gradually begins to expand your practice.
So if you have not done so already,
I invite you to go through the prior sessions in order,
Perhaps spending a week with each session.
This will gently guide you over the course of a month into a culmination of a daily silence practice and routine.
The simplicity of this practice can be quite deceiving,
However,
Simplicity does not always equal consistency.
In silence practice or in any other form of meditation practice,
The real transformation and noticeable change happens with the consistency of practice over a very long time.
It has actually been said that it is much more valuable to sit and meditate for three minutes consistently every single day as opposed to meditation for one hour once a week.
Similarly,
We might eat an apple every day for good health,
But the idea is not to eat seven apples on Sunday.
In Zen meditation,
Which is the central practice of Zen Buddhism in Japan,
Silent sitting is the essential practice.
Zazen literally means sitting Zen.
It is with the routine of silence that we are establishing in our lives a foundation for all other practices that will come.
And so in closing this session and this series on silence,
There's no better way for us to close this time together than to simply sit together in silence.
I invite you to join me in finding a comfortable seated posture or perhaps if you're lying down just before bed,
You can simply relax and settle into the silence as you begin to drift away to sleep.
We will begin our time of silence with the sound of the bell.
And then our time with the closing bell.
We will begin our time with the closing bell.
We will begin our time with the closing bell.
We will begin our time with the closing bell.
We will begin our time with the closing bell.
We will begin our time with the closing bell.
We will begin our time with the closing bell.
We will begin our time with the closing bell.
