The Wisdom of Doing Nothing

Opens with a brief guided meditation and reflection on non-striving, followed by 20 minutes of silence marked with chimes, concluding with a short guided meditation back into your day. Recorded live at a weekly Centering Prayer group.

Transcript

I put up a list of seven attributes that are more attitudinal factors,

He calls them,

Related to mindfulness in this case.

So this came from John Kabat-Zinn.

He's got a list of seven.

Thanks to Bertie,

I now had an eighth and he doesn't have compassion on there,

So I added that.

But one of them was non-striving.

And it was interesting because I just presented the seven and then we kind of talked about it as a group.

And the students really focused on that idea of non-striving,

In part because it was so foreign to them.

They all spoke about,

They're like,

I don't even know what that would mean.

As a student and as somebody who's trying to get established in a career or in life,

You're just always striving.

We're always striving.

And it was like even just having the thought that they could not strive for 20 minutes was like you could literally see the weight being lifted off their shoulder,

Like,

Oh,

When we do this practice,

We don't have to strive.

And so I was thinking about that.

I know somewhere,

Probably many places,

Thomas Merton,

Who was a monk,

A Cistercian monk in the Catholic tradition in the mid-20th century,

Had some things to say about not doing,

The wisdom of not doing.

When I've talked about this in my classes before,

I've used the example of Gandhi when he was sitting in his ashram and he was just kind of starting this movement to get the British out of India,

And he tells the story in his autobiography of how he went into his ashram and people all over the world and journalists and politicians were like,

Well,

What's he doing?

And he's probably sitting down with his strategic team and coming up with how he's going to get rid of the British.

And in his autobiography,

Gandhi says,

I wasn't doing anything.

He was reading what he said was his favorite spiritual text,

Which was the Bhagavad Gita,

And he was spinning his own clothes from thread.

And just as he describes it,

He was waiting.

He was doing nothing.

He didn't want to act until he had a clear vision of what he wanted to do.

And he didn't want to force that vision.

He wanted to wait for it.

He wanted to do nothing.

And then I think it was a couple months that he was just kind of holed up and everybody would.

.

.

And then what he did was after that,

He finally kind of discerned this idea of walking from wherever he was to the sea.

And this was where he did his symbolic act of boiling salt and creating salt from the ocean because under British law,

That was illegal.

And he wanted to point out the absurdity of it,

Which became a hugely symbolic moment in this nonviolent movement.

So I was thinking about that in relation to my students,

That idea of non-striving,

That idea of not doing,

Setting aside a time where we're not striving,

Not doing.

And then we just kind of stay curious.

Where does our life go?

What other kinds of ideas come up or ways of engaging in our daily lives when we're not so focused on striving all the time?

So I more oppose that as an example and maybe a question for us to stay curious about.

So I'll read the four guidelines.

And then again,

We'll have 20 minutes to sit.

There'll be a bell at the end and I'll do kind of a guided out of the meditation and then do three bells.

So the four guidelines of Centering Prayer are one,

Choose a sacred word as the symbol of your intention to consent to God's presence and action within or to whatever is arising in the moment.

Second guideline is sitting comfortably and with eyes closed.

Feel briefly and silently introduce the sacred word as the symbol of your consent to God's presence and action within.

Three,

When engaged with your thoughts,

Thoughts can include bodily sensations,

Feelings,

Images,

Reflections or memories.

When engaged with those thoughts,

Return ever so gently to the sacred word.

And then four,

At the end of the prayer period,

Remain in silence with eyes closed for a couple of minutes.

Okay.

So that's it for this week.

I hope you enjoyed it.

I hope you found it helpful.

Thank you.

When you're ready,

You can start to bring your awareness back or externally become aware of the sounds in the room,

Sensations on your skin.

You start to bring some motion to your extremities or move around if you like.

Take your time.

I just invite you to stay curious to how you're doing and striving.

Maybe it feels different when you set aside time to not do,

To not strive.

That changes the quality of your daily experience in any way.

Thank you.

Reviews

Thank you for the guidance and opportunity to meditate with silence.

The

Helpful introductory reflection. Not ideal sound quality, but no problem hearing what was said. Thank you!

I really love your meditations. Thank you! 💖

Grounding
Loved the history on Gandhi re: non striving 🥰

Thank you for setting me a good path back to finding stillness

First time I’ve tried to sit and meditate without a guided sequence. I felt twitches in my muscles and kept brining it back to my breath, feel amazing afterwards.

I wasn’t sure what to use as a sacred word, so I tried to keep it simple and just use the awareness of my breathing.

Awesome! I didn't realize that striving can be such a tough one to detect and then release. Also I discovered that I need to practice more in silence. It's not so easy because it's the only time we sit with just ourselves:) and that can be enough if we let it be ..... beautiful, thank you!

Thanks very much. Kevin Clancy

Excellent concept and practice. 🙏🏽namaste

Thank you for this Meditation that helped me to give up striving for control instead believe in God

Opening up mindset in a world of constant striving, thank you. Specially interesting as an educator

Very helpful set up to a time of silence and non-striving. Thank you.

Beautiful and brief opening and closure leaving most of the time to the mediation

Nice to have the short talk and then timed meditation. I'm happy to have meditation options from the Christian tradition.

Lovely food for thought. Thank you. 🙏🏽

Yes to nondoing.. graci🙏🏽

I liked this meditation. My mind was racing at times and I will be doing this one again. I love the thought of setting aside time in my day to simply not strive. Very freeing. Thanks Tom!

Just what I needed . So essential to stop all activity and just rest .

Fabulous, insightful meditation!