Menu

grounding and stillness

Stillness as a life skill

Stillness As A Life Skill

,

Stillness as a life skill

Our work around stillness has come out of listening to lots of people we’ve worked with answer the question “What are you really looking for in your life?” Often the first response we hear is people saying that they simply want peace: “A sense of peace in my life and in my heart that tells me I’m ok.”

It became apparent that this is a deep desire we all have. We all need a bit of stillness in life to reground and recentre ourselves, particularly in the face of what can sometimes be a manic world.

What Is Stillness?

Many people think of stillness as the absence of activity. But stillness is not simply doing nothing. Stillness is so much more than being still.

Stillness is about being present to what is flowing through us. The stillness we aim for is more like the peaceful rhythm of your breath or your pulse. It’s the stillness of a flowing river, or a gently billowing sea. That’s the stillness of a human being.

Why Is Stillness Important?

A lot of us feel like we’re constantly living off balance and under pressure. It can sometimes only take the smallest thing to tip us over. It feels like many of us are operating on the edge of our energy.

But within the busyness it’s hard to really listen to ourselves. It’s only when we find stillness that we truly begin to notice what’s happening below the surface, and sense what the deep drivers in our lives really are.

And as we find a bit of peace and a bit of comfort with who we are, we begin to listen to each better too. It’s only when we pause and think a little more deeply that we understand other people, and find our love or respect for them.

There’s also something that changes when we come into any activity from a place of stillness. We’re just better at it. We’re more resourceful, we’re more attuned, we’re happier.

Stillness In Daily Life

We believe that stillness is more than just a reflective practise – it’s a life skill.

It’s all very well intentionally coming away on retreat or going for a walk and finding peace there. But can you find your stillness in the midst of a frantic day, an argument, or a crisis situation?

Our ability to come in and out of stillness is an essential life skill. When we get busy, it’s easy for things to become slightly manic or distorted. So we need to learn to pause, breathe, and ground to our deeper selves. Then, we find more resourceful ways of engaging with others, and make better choices in our lives.

The ability to pause and to find an answer from a different place is what differentiates people who live well and are able to respond to life creatively from those who get scattered and respond to life reactively.

Stillness And The Good Way

Stillness is really important on our retreats. It gives us a chance to listen deeply, and to find some of the answers we’re seeking within ourselves.

We find that stillness in a group can be infectious. When 2 or 3 of us get there, the whole group settles, and we find a quality of relationship that’s really unparalleled in most of our experience. That’s what’s really special about our retreats – the quality of shared stillness that we find.

Stillness is particularly helpful when we’re exploring the bigger questions in life, like we do on our Crossroads retreats (LINK). Crossroads questions (LINK) need to be answered from a place of calm, clear, still, centredness. That’s the place we make good decisions from, because we’re connected to ourselves.

What Next?

Learning to keep our stillness in the middle of the busyness, the pressure and the noise that’s in the world today is at the core of a lot of our work. It’s a focus for us and something which shapes all of the retreats we offer.

If you’d like to explore this a little more, you might like to join our free guided meditations or consider a Finding Stillness retreat.

Crossroads blog - digital fatigue

Digital Fatigue

, , , 0

Digital Fatigue

Digital Fatigue

Feelings of stress and exhaustion that often accompany days spent staring at a screen will be familiar to many of us, and ‘digital fatigue’ can signify numerous different micro-events that challenge us throughout the day and threaten to throw off our emotional balance.

When fatigue manifests, it does so across a spectrum of sensations, feelings and behaviours. Simple exhaustion is the most obvious, but irritability, a lack of focus, anxiety and even depression can all be brought on by the daily challenges of our digital lives.

 

Finding Our Way Back

A frustratingly slow internet connection, email miscommunications, clients and colleagues who bombard us with messages: although these external technological pressures may often be unavoidable, by being active and choiceful in our emotional response to daily stresses we can find a way back to feeling energised.

Stepping into each moment intentionally returns power to us as individuals. If a video call is dropping out repeatedly, or the presentation is taking five hours to upload, the mounting frustration we feel threatens to sweep our whole mental state along with it. In allowing these feelings to carry us day in, day out, it contributes to our sense of mental and spiritual exhaustion in a profound way.

 

Choosing Stillness

Instead, by making the choice to acknowledge and challenge these feelings we can unravel the pattern of emotional fatigue. Choosing to plant our feet on the ground and breathe deeply, to smile or laugh inwardly, reconnects us to our own stillness even when all around us is a flurry of activity and pressure. Ten seconds, thirty seconds, one minute, five minutes; these small moments add up to a sustainable and grounded sense of acceptance. When we reconnect with our own internal stillness, we discover our own limitless source of energy.

 

Chris Blakeley

You can see our upcoming online Crossroads Retreats here.

Crossroads-1200x800-layout1014-1fbjhs1

Why mindfulness doesn’t work.

, 0

Crossroads-1200x628-layout1476-1fbji5q

It doesn’t work. I’ll never get any good at it. I can’t do it. I keep trying but my mind keeps taking over.

These are typical comments we hear over and over at the start of our retreats when we ask people about their experiences of meditation or silent prayer.

Finding Stillness

So how about we make the start point in finding stillness, to just stop trying.

In our approach stillness is not something you work at to achieve. Stillness finds you. But it can only do so when you stop trying to achieve it.

What is the point of having the mind try to stop the mind? It just adds another layer of noise.

True Stillness

True stillness is in fact not still at all. It is a peaceful acceptance of yourself just as you are – and the world around you just as it is. We welcome the unstoppable processing of our minds and are grateful for this marvelous capacity to associate and organise our experience.

But we just leave it be, trusting the mind to do what it needs to do so that we can draw on it when we need it. And that’s the point, it doesn’t need our interference.

Instead we learn to locate our awareness in more fruitful areas – in breath, in the beautiful flow of life through our body, in our own presence and the bigger presence around us….  None of it still, all in flow… all full of intelligence and knowing.

And we just let it be… not judging or classifying,  just receiving.

And then, maybe, stillness will find you – like the stillness of a flowing river, a rolling ocean, a fresh spring dawn.

And you will learn to remember. This is who I am.

Join Us

You can join us every Monday morning to practice stillness in a completely free online guided session. Click here to find out more and to save your spot.