session 4 - stillness

The speaker discusses the challenge of finding stillness in a noisy, fast-paced world. They share their personal struggle with patience and the importance of making a deliberate effort to be still mentally and physically. Through exploring different spiritual traditions, they found meditation, specifically Transcendental Meditation, to be a helpful practice. They emphasize the benefits of consistent meditation in achieving inner stillness, leading to better decision-making and creativity. The speaker also mentions the potential pitfalls of seeking stillness through addictive behaviors and highlights the importance of finding balance in life. Stillness. This is a very, very difficult one. For me, it has been. In the same way that I talked one time about how I remember at eight years old being at a George Michael concert and somehow the thought came to my mind, I am not a patient person. Now, I don't know if this is self-fulfilling prophecy, what have you, but it's something that I've dealt with for my whole life is the, I don't want to say inability to be still, but the challenge of being still mentally and physically. Of course, there are hyperactivity disorders. There are also clinical issues out there and the noise of the world, the noise of society, the fact that we're all plugged in all the time doesn't lend itself to stillness, so we have to push back. We have to make a deliberate effort to be still. In the same way, and this is something we can talk about later, in the same way that we have to make a deliberate effort to eat healthy because the industrial food complex is set up in such a way that we don't eat healthy and they want us addicted to sugars and all of those things. That's not the topic of our conversation right now, but it points back to the fact that in this culture and in this society, we have to deliberately work against a lot of the forces being pushed on us. That's just the way it is. That's the nature of this incarnation for many of us, not even just in the West, in the East now too. How do I find stillness? Well, there are good and bad ways of finding stillness, even that good and bad. I'm subject to those things, to that old thinking, just as much as anyone else. Remember, I'm by no means perfect. I'm not teaching you anything. I'm just reflecting my own experience. I've come to a place in my life where after following the breadcrumbs of my curiosity and my intuition and my interest in different spiritual traditions, I have implemented meditation into my life. I have tried so many. Eventually, I came upon Transcendental Meditation through David Lynch, which was a wonderful story that I can talk about another time, but it was David Lynch himself who got me into TM. May he rest. I try twice a day to meditate with my mantra. There are so many different kinds of meditation. There are mindful meditation. There's mantra meditation. I mean, there's so many and there's so much available online. The trick is to allow yourself a moment throughout the day consistently to be shut off from the constant influx of noise. The air we even breathe in this culture is laden with noise until you arrive deliberately at a place where through the breath or through some other vehicle, you can come back to stillness or to a semblance of stillness at the very least. If you do that consistently, it yields a place of inner stillness from which you can act and operate. In my experience, it's in those moments and in those times when some of the best things that you do and best decisions you can make and insights come to the surface. I think about the fact that children these days, I mean, nobody likes to be bored, but there's a function to being bored. If you're bored for long enough, the mind will find something to do or it will slow down and that which is beyond the mind can start to inform a thought. These are abstract concepts to an extent, but they're important to circle around if you're interested in finding creativity and striking balance, which is what these conversations are about. Balance in life, balance in art, balance in relationships, balance in spirituality, balance in the way that we relate to ourselves and others and the balance between our inner world and our outer world. I think that balance is a really good place to have as your ground floor. Sometimes it's good to be out of balance even, I'll go so far as to say. Like I said, all things in moderation, even moderation. If you can look to find a practice, something that you can be consistent with and go through the difficulty of it. It may be difficult at first and if you stay with it, you will feel results. This is a law of nature. There are also other ways of achieving stillness. Addiction can seemingly give you stillness. Your mind can be cluttered and going in a thousand different directions and getting a hit of your cigarette or getting online to play a game or mind doom scrolling or pornography or any of the things that focus the mind so intently that it feels like we're achieving stillness. It's a lower tier of stillness than the stillness that comes from a deliberate practice of a meditation or something related, something akin to a meditation. But we have to accept that there are even modes of finding stillness that might serve a purpose in the short term and eventually allow us to find a longer term solution. Now, I am subject to meditation, to addiction in my own life. That's something that we can get into in another conversation and I will be forthcoming and vulnerable about it because why not? The mind can be our best friend. It can be our worst enemy. The key is to find ways of making it our servant, not our master. This life is tricky. This society and this culture are very loud and very noisy and they require us to be very deliberate about the way that we deal with the onslaught of things coming at us all the time.