Moving Into Stillness - Stillness: The Peace Within (Erich Schiffmann)

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The Peace Within

 

You imagine a spinning top. Stillness is like a perfectly centered

top, spinning so fast it appears motionless. It appears this way not

because it isn't moving, but because it's spinning at full speed.

Stillness is not the absence or negation of energy, life, or

movement. Stillness is dynamic. It is unconflicted movement, life in

harmony with itself, skill in action. It can be experienced whenever

there is total, uninhibited, unconflicted participation in the moment

you are in - when you are wholeheartedly present with whatever you

are doing.

 

For most of us, however, most of the time, our lives do not resemble

a perfectly centered top, spinning so fast it appears motionless. Our

lives are more like a top in a somewhat wild, erratic, and chaotic

spin, we know we're alive because at least we're still spinning, but

we are not quite perfectly centered, and we are not spinning anywhere

near full speed. We don't have as much energy as we'd like, we are

not experiencing as much aliveness as we might, nor are we

experiencing the peace of stillness or the joy of being.

 

Stillness, therefore, is a higher energy state than what we're used

to. This is because we are rarely wholehearted, or unconflicted,

about anything. When you are not wholehearted, when you'd rather be

someplace other than where you are, parts of you shut down and begin

not to participate. Your energy circulation becomes constricted, and

the creative life force is unable to flow through you unimpeded. Your

energy flow, the amount of life force flowing through you, begins to

diminish. The source of the energy does not diminish, but the amount

that flows through you does. This leads to ill health, low energy,

lowered vitality, lack of enthusiasm, depression, frustration,

unhappiness, and suffering. None of this feels good.

 

When you are wholehearted about something, however, when you are

where you want to be and are participating fully in the moment you

are in - sometimes enthusiastic, sometimes mellow - you will

experience a new sense of aliveness. You will experience a surge of

energy, renewed vigor. This is not because there is actually an

increase in energy, but because you are not constricting it quite so

much. There is now a better energy flow. There is less conflict, less

friction, less not wanting to be where you are, and therefore - for

you - there will be the experience of more energy.

 

This occurs whenever you are not attempting to spin clockwise and

counter-clockwise simultaneously. Spinning in opposite directions

happens when you act on opposing desires, when you are conflicted

about what you are doing, not wholehearted - granted, this is most of

the time. Stillness happens when you relax inside and are in harmony

with yourself.

 

 

This is the point: When you experience yourself in stillness - that

is, when you give your undivided attention to experiencing the truth

about you - you will experience the conflict-free, calm, dynamic

peace of perfectly centered abundant life energy. This exquisite

peace deep within you is actually the experience of God, or the

harmony of oneness felt within you as you. It's how God is

experiencing Himself-Herself now and always. It is the

phenomenological feeling-tone of Being, or Existence, and it is the

truest thing about who you are. When you experience the peace within

you, you will spontaneously undergo a fundamental transformation in

the way you think about yourself and how you see the world. Nothing

will seem quite the same ever again.

 

Yoga

 

Yoga is a way of moving into stillness in order to experience the

truth of who you are. It is also a way of learning to be centered in

action so that you always have the clearest perspective on what's

happening and are therefore able to respond most appropriately. Yoga

is not the only way of doing this, of course, but it is an excellent

way. It is an ancient process designed to help you uncover and

discover your true nature so you can live daily life with that new

awareness.

 

As you move into the depths of stillness, subtle and powerful changes

will become apparent in your life. These will be both profound and

entirely welcome. You will become familiar with the creative God

Force inside you, the energy at your core. The world will look more

beautiful because you're seeing it as it is, without the distorting

influence of your conditioning. You will feel different, happy for no

apparent reason. It will seem as though you have undergone an

important change, a rebirth, as though you've become a new person,

and yet you will feel more yourself than ever before.

 

Moving into stillness in order to experience your true nature is the

primary theme of yoga simply because everything about you - every

thought, feeling, and emotion, as well as every aspect of your

behavior - is predicated on the way you feel about yourself. The way

you feel about yourself determines how you think, what you do, and

how you interact with the world. It's the basic factor that governs

the quality of your life, the degree to which you are interested in

living, and the way in which you interpret what's happening.

 

When your evaluation of self changes, when you feel differently about

yourself, everything about you changes: your thoughts, feelings,

emotions - every aspect of your behavior. The way you interpret and

respond to the events in your life will also change. You will

perceive the specific circumstances of your daily life differently

because you'll have a new awareness and vantage point. You'll have

less fear, fewer worries, more enthusiasm for life, and you will

spontaneously become more effective in all you choose to do.

 

Accordingly, the way you interpret and respond to what happened in

your past will also change. You'll look back and say, " Oh, so that's

what was really going on! " And now, because you are seeing the

situation differently, with a clearer and more mature understanding,

you will find yourself able and willing to release old hurts,

attitudes, and response patterns that were founded on your earlier

limited understanding and that are now no longer appropriate. It

feels good to let go of the past and be new in the now.

 

The way you anticipate and imagine your future will also change. The

greater your understanding, the more grand your vision. Your

imagination will no longer be distorted by the fears and imagined

needs of the ego, but will be grounded in Reality. The future will

look bright. You will spontaneously become optimistic about the

future well-being of yourself and humanity and everything associated

with the earth, sky, and universe: Creation. Therefore, everything

about you and your world will change relative to your change in self-

image: present, past, and future.

 

Here is our situation: We are ignorant of our true nature, our real

identity. We don't know who we really are. This is because we have

never experienced ourselves directly. We have never stayed " home "

long enough to experience the truth about ourselves. We were not

encouraged to do this. Instead we accepted as true what other people

told us about ourselves. And, unfortunately, we were taught by people

who, in all likelihood, and through no fault of their own, did not

actually know.

 

For example, when you were a child and your mother praised you for

being " good, " you defined yourself as " good. " You began to think of

yourself as a " good " person. When your father scolded you for

being " bad, " you defined yourself as " bad, " and you began to think of

yourself as " good " and " bad " at the same time. Other people said

other things about you, everyone seemed to have informed opinions,

and since you didn't know - you were just a child - you believed them

all. There was no reason not to. They seemed to know. Before too

long, and not surprisingly, it became very confusing because we were

defining ourselves and forming our self-images based on other

people's contradictory evaluations of who we are. From very early on,

a fundamental conflict was introduced into our psyches revolving

around this basic and most important issue: Who am I, really? And

because we were not encouraged to find out for ourselves, we believed

what other people told us. The result is that we feel guilty,

ashamed, embarrassed, and confused about who we are. We feel judged.

 

If you feel guilty, ashamed, embarrassed, or confused about who you

are, if you feel judged, you will invariably have difficulty giving

and receiving love. It will not feel natural to you to express love

easily. And when you are not giving or receiving love, when the

energy of love is not circulating or passing through you easily, you

gradually become bitter, you lose your natural sweetness. You

unknowingly restrict your primary source of nourishment and therefore

become hungry on all levels. You become unhappy or ill. You become

unpleasant company. You forget how to love, and you forget how it

feels to be loved. And all of this happens, to whatever extent,

because guilt makes you feel that you are not worthy of love, that

you do not deserve it, that you have none to give, and that in fact

you are unlovable.

 

To some degree, this is the conclusion many of us have unconsciously

taken on without further scrutiny. We take it for granted. We believe

it's true. We think our guilt is justified and that punishment is our

just reward. Our basic belief is, " I deserved the suffering I

experienced in my past, and I deserve the suffering 1 am experiencing

now. And the future probably holds a fair bit of suffering and

hardship for me also. And then I'll die - and who knows what that's

like:l It's probably pretty horrible, too. I mean, life's not easy.

Let's be realistic here.... " And yet, all of this rigamarole is due

to a fundamental misperception of Reality. All the guilt,

unworthiness, justified suffering, self-hate, unhappiness, and

unlovableness, as well as the subsequent inability to give or receive

love easily, have come into being because of an inaccurate and

incomplete perception of who we really are.

 

When you experience the truth of who you are, you will not feel

guilty, ashamed, embarrassed, or confused. You will experience

instead the tremendous relief of clarity - relief because you are not

the unworthy, undeserving person you thought you were and because the

internal pressure caused by these fundamental misperceptions is

finally being released. When this happens, you will experience a

healing sense of relief followed by a profoundly soothing inner

peace, an even " at-easeness " - a stillness.

 

Levels of Stillness

 

There are two levels of stillness. The first level involves learning

to relax, become centered, and meditate. The technique involves

sitting or lying down and being absolutely still - without reading a

book, talking, watching the television, or listening to the radio. It

involves deliberately pausing, stopping all physical movement,

becoming relaxed, calm, and quiet inside, and just being -

consciously being conscious. It's about being centered and still in

the moment you are presently in.

 

For a few minutes, every form of external activity stops. Then, in

that physical quietness, you turn your attention inward and focus on

yourself. Focus on what it feels like to be you. Experience you.

Immerse your conscious awareness in your own unique feeling-tone, the

feeling-tone of the Universe expressing Itself as you. Do this

deliberately in order to consciously experience the truth of who you

are.

 

LEVEL ONE

 

The first level of stillness is about being with yourself in order to

know yourself. This is accomplished by being wide awake and aware as

you deliberately relax into yourself. The idea is to consciously

enter into a state wherein you temporarily suspend everything you

think you know about who you are, including anything you have ever

been taught, and simply be attentive to what's going on right there

where you are. You practice being quiet, both physically and

mentally, as you pay attention to the sensations in your body, the

various thoughts in your mind, and your current experience of being

conscious and alive. You practice simple body-mind awareness, being

conscious of the moment you are now in, and thereby experience with

clarity the energy of you. You consciously experience yourself as you

actually are. In this way you open yourself to a new, truer, less

distorted experience of you and the world.

 

When you are able to relax and quietly suspend all your firmly held

false ideas and limiting beliefs about who and what you are, only

what is true will remain. You will then experience your ever-existing

truth for yourself. This is like polishing a mirror - removing the

grime - and seeing yourself clearly for the very first time. And

though this is not as easy as it sounds, it is also not particularly

difficult. Let me clarify something first, however. In order to let

go of the false beliefs you have about who and what you are, it is

not necessary to know which beliefs are true and which are false. In

fact, you probably don't know, and this is the problem. If you knew,

you would not be uncertain about your true identity. If you knew, you

would not be experiencing conflict and inner turmoil; you would be

experiencing peace. Therefore, let go of them all! Let go of

everything you think you know about who you are, and see what's left.

 

When you let go of everything you think you know about yourself and

stay with what's left, when you willingly abandon the contradictory

evaluations of who you are and courageously reach deeply into

yourself in order to experience yourself directly, you will come upon

a new experience of who you are. You will sense the creative energy

that is the life of you, and you will then define and think about

yourself in a new and expanded way. And since the way you think about

and define yourself is central to your perception, behavior, and

experience of the world, your world will spontaneously change as your

self-concept changes and comes into closer alignment with what's

really true.

 

LEVEL TWO

 

The second level of stillness involves living your daily life with

this new and growing inner certainty of who you really are. in other

words, meditation in action. This is not always easy, and it takes a

little getting used to, for it means staying in touch with the

deepest truth about yourself in the midst of daily life. This

involves continually letting go of the judgments, evaluations, and

contradictory opinions about yourself that arise in your mind

throughout the day and in your relationships with other people. You

do this by staying centered in your peace. You thereby learn to be

suspicious of any suggestion - from yourself or others - that speaks

of your guilt, your unworthiness, or your unlovableness. You learn it

is appropriate to disregard any remaining inner self-criticism

because in Level One you experienced yourself in a new way: as

fundamentally lovable, innocent of all blame, and therefore deserving

of every good thing.

 

Having experienced the truth about yourself in Level One, albeit

momentarily, you had an insight - a glimmer of clarity, a moment of

experience - about an inner truth that you can't quite ignore. You

experienced yourself in a new way and now know your deepest truth,

even though you may not yet fully believe it. Part of you knows the

truth, but you're not totally convinced, and understandably so.

Besides, when you are surrounded by others who are instead convinced

of other things, it is doubly difficult to overcome your doubts.

 

This is similar to what it must have been like for Copernicus when he

first suspected that the world was round. He had an insight into the

way things are, yet part of him probably still believed the flat-

world theory. And because he was surrounded by other flat-world

theorists, and because he couldn't yet prove the world was round, it

would have been difficult for him to be fully convinced or convincing

to others.

 

The way to experience the truth of who you are (Level One) is by

letting go of all your learned preconceptions about yourself and then

staying present and open-minded for the experience. The way to stay

in touch with your truth (Level Two), and confirm it to yourself over

and over until there is absolutely no doubt, is by continuing to do

what you did in Level One, but doing it now moment by moment during

the day. This means, essentially, letting go of pretense and self-

critical judgment and allowing self-acceptance - letting yourself be

who you truly are. Again, you do this by staying centered in your

peace, for only when you are at peace will you have the clearest

perspective. By staying centered in your peace in the midst of daily

life, you will validate your new perception of yourself and gradually

become fully convinced. As a consequence, you will then be convincing

to others.

 

Moving Into Stillness - Stillness: The Peace Within (Erich Schiffmann)

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