Silence And Stillness

Silence and Stillness are the very foundation for all other spiritual practices. In this introduction to the art and practice of silence, discover how this practice naturally emerged from a year of living in solitude in a tiny house in Japan.

Transcript

It is inner stillness that will save and transform the world.

Eckhart Tolle.

Once upon a time,

I gathered this as a quote that spoke to me.

This promise of stillness and what it could make possible was something I wanted,

Something I longed for.

That I had not experienced in such a profound and transformational way.

As I express these words today from my heart to yours,

I have now tasted the depths of this level of stillness and I too believe that it will save and transform the world.

In the summer of 2019,

I closed a business,

Sold my home,

Purged all of my belongings down to a few small boxes of meaningful items,

Mostly from travels around the world,

And I moved to a tiny Japanese house in Kyoto,

Japan for a mindful year of stillness.

It was an intentional decision with one purpose in mind,

To step out of the world as I knew it for one brief year of pause.

Stillness.

I moved to Japan to allow every last fragment of myself to break completely apart and to sit in stillness in that space and simply be,

Until I allowed to rise to the surface only those things that were truly worth reassembling,

Absolutely nothing else.

The simplest and purest version of myself.

I was seeking to cultivate a way of being within myself,

My true home,

During this sacred time in Kyoto.

Stillness however long and far one's journey takes them to reach this place,

Is the absolute and only place to begin.

It is only from this place of complete stillness that one can begin to be silent and hear the soul.

There is a philosophical principle in Japanese culture known as Ma.

It can be translated as the pause or emptiness between.

Silent,

Empty space.

It can be found in Japanese aesthetics,

Art,

Culture.

It is why Japanese people can go for long quiet pauses in conversation without becoming uncomfortable.

So at the outset of our journey together we want to cultivate and establish the ritual of silence and stillness.

We want to think of this as the deep rich foundational soil in which all else,

The rest of our practices for our lives will be grown from.

The mindfulness practice of silence has a depth beyond measure and this ritual or way of life does not happen quickly and yet it is a natural return to our own inner silence and stillness that is the very core of the nature of who we are.

In the words of Mother Teresa,

We need to find God and he cannot be found in the noise and restlessness.

God is the friend of silence.

See how nature,

Trees,

Flowers,

Grass grow in silence.

See the stars,

The moon,

The sun,

How they move in silence.

We need silence to be able to touch souls.

So as we begin this journey we will begin by cultivating the practice of daily silence to begin the day and to end the day.

If we think of each morning as a new birth and each evening as a small death,

We enter the world from the space of stillness and silence and we then return to the silence and stillness at the end of the day's journey.

Creating this one practice alone,

Silence,

If you were to add nothing else moving forward would forever change your life and your way of being in the world.

So this will be our practice as we begin.

We will begin very slowly with a very short window each morning and each evening and then as time goes on we will expand our time of silence and solitude from there.

And then at the end we will have created a mindfulness practice and ritual that will remain with us throughout the remainder of our journey together.

So in closing I'd like to invite you to find a comfortable place to sit or lie down.

Let your eyes softly close and drink in these words from the author Hermann Hessen.

True action,

Good and radiant action my friends,

Does not spring from activity,

From busy bustling.

It does not spring from industrious hammering.

It grows in the solitude of the mountains.

It grows on the summits where silence and danger dwell.

It grows out of the suffering which you have not yet learned to suffer.

Solitude is the path over which destiny endeavors to lead man to himself.

Solitude is the path that men most fear,

A path fraught with terrors where snakes and toads lie in wait.

Without solitude there is no suffering.

Without solitude there is no heroism.

Most men,

The herd,

Have never tasted solitude.

They leave father and mother,

But only to crawl to a wife and quietly succumb to a new warmth and new ties.

They are never alone.

They never commune with themselves.

And when a solitary man crosses their path,

They fear him and hate him like the plague.

They fling stones at him and find no peace until they are far away from him.

The air around him smells of stars,

Of cold stellar spaces.

He lacks the soft,

Warm fragrance of home and hatchery.

A man must be indifferent to the possibility of falling if he wants to taste solitude and face up to his own destiny.

It is easier and sweeter to walk with a people with a multitude even through misery.

It is easier and more comforting to devote oneself to the tasks of the day,

The tasks meted out by the collectivity.

Blessed be he who has found his solitude,

Not the solitude pictured in painting or poetry,

But his own unique predestined solitude.

Blessed is he who knows how to suffer.

Blessed is he who bears the magic stone in his heart.

To him comes destiny.

From him comes authentic action.

You were made to be yourselves.

You were made to enrich this world with a sound,

A tone,

A shadow.

In each one of you,

There is a hidden being still in the deep sleep of childhood.

Bring it to life.

In each one of you,

There is a call,

A will,

An impulse of nature,

An impulse toward the future,

The new,

The higher.

Let it mature.

Let it resound.

Nurture it.

Your future is not this or that.

It is not money or power.

It is not wisdom or success at your trade.

Your future,

Your hard dangerous path is this.

To mature and to find God in yourselves.

Finally I leave you with a poem that I wrote which came forth from the silence.

Overwhelmed with the world around me,

I go within.

It is there that the entire universe resides.

Only from this place of silence and stillness can I create the only world I will ever live in.