Love & Anxiety #35: In Praise of Stillness!

Hello everyone, I have been traveling and helping with Somatic trainings for the past few weeks and have not had any time to sit down and put my thoughts to “paper”. But I am back home now and excited to post this  blog. The theme of the last blog was about the need to balance the body states of Stillness and Movement, and the impact each one has on our well-being and anxiety levels. Today we are going to focus solely on the benefits of Stillness. For quite a few reasons, most people find Stillness more challenging to practice than Movement. Except perhaps for those people who love to meditate, or inveterate couch potatoes, and sometimes, people who smoke tons of weed.

Our popular culture praises movement, especially forward movement. You receive lots of kudos, not to mention MONEY, for accomplishing, achieving, being all that you can be, etc.  And, there is nothing wrong with those things. The problems tend to come when we get way out of balance, which at least a few of us are. Movement also feels better to many people. Exercise has been credited to be the absolute best deterrent to aging, and the best support for our emotional well-being. When we are moving, we also send somatic messages of self-efficacy and agency to our reptilian brain via the limbic system. Movement usually feels good.

Stillness on the other hand often speedily brings about an internal sense of discomfort, restlessness, extreme anxiety, or even shame. When we are externally Still, that is usually when our “Stuff” boils up, and in consequence, when we become most aware of it. I don’t think I need to take too much time to define “Stuff” since I am writing to fellow humans. We all have it, our wounds, our stucknesses (is that a word), our extreme emotional states, our fears. For many of us, when we begin a practice of becoming externally Still, our internal world compensates by going bat crap crazy. Years ago when I first began to practice Stillness, it felt like the emotional equivalent of a sewer pipe bursting. It was so messy inside of my body and mind.

This is one reason why a New Year’s resolution to begin to meditate, or to pray more often, usually drops off by January 15th. Sitting Still with our “Stuff” can be really frightening. A while ago Carl Jung wrote quite a bit about “Stuff”. He called it the Shadow self and proposed there are many “gifts” available when we connect with our own Shadow, the disowned and wounded parts of our beings. But most of us hate the wrapping paper on those “gifts” and stow them in a dark closet unopened. As an unfortunate consequence, much of our conscious behavior is often influenced by stress/fear and feelings of which we are not fully aware. Some of the new Neuroscience research suggests at least 80% of our relations with other people are driven by our sub-cortical brain regions. Way before fMRI technology came along, Sigmund Freud, one of Jung’s near contemporaries, intuited this and stated: “That which we repress, we express.”

Slowing down is often a beginning step to the practice of becoming Still. When we slow down and learn how to periodically become externally Still, this is one means for embracing our “Stuff” so it loses its power to direct our behavior outside of our conscious awareness. This is a great growth practice but is usually quite painful so it is easy to avoid doing. A metaphor I use with clients to describe this struggle is, “Water-skilling across the surface of life”. When we move quickly and get a lot done, we do not need to feel those subterranean rumblings that come up from our hearts and bellies in times of stress or pain.

The good news is that at some point, after learning to embrace our “Stuff” while being externally Still, we begin to experience one of the greatest gifts of this process, internal Stillness! Where we can just sit and be, and let thoughts come and go across the sky of our minds like so many fluffy clouds, and feel the peace in our bodies and the goodness of being alive. Or even get to the point where there are no thoughts, just a deep peaceful calm and a quiet joy! This my friends, I propose must feel better than any drug, and is our birthright as a human being living on the earth. Many people who are trapped in the terrible cycle of addiction are just trying to get to this state of quiet peacefulness. For that matter, its a state everyone longs to experience.

When we are able to achieve external and internal Stillness, some of the additional benefits include; the ability to feel the goodness of our lives more deeply, expanded creativity, and a greater ability to be Self-aware and to listen to our bodies. But perhaps the greatest gift is the ability to be present to each moment without judgment or fear!

To close, as a final plug for how great periodic Stillness is, here are a few of the activities Stillness offers that frenetic movement does not: Sleep, hugging, cuddling, nursing a baby, staring into a lover’s eyes, meditating/praying, having a deep and meaningful conversation at the dinner table long after the food is consumed, just to name a few.

So go forth this week and if you usually don’t “do” Stillness, maybe just give it a try for 10 minutes and see what happens. If something you don’t love comes up inside you, remember Jung, and try to see it as a gift from inside of you. If you are already good at being Still, keep it up. The world needs more of you to balance out all the humans racing frenetically about. As always, I would love to hear how it goes.

Going Deeper:

1.) What are your instinctive responses to this blog? Is there some resonance in your mind/body, or resistance? If so, what is the root of the resistance?  What did you learn about Stillness in your first family? When you are Still, are you aware of your “Stuff”? If so, are you able to embrace it as an important part of being you?

2.) If you are a meditator or enjoy a form of periodic Stillness, what gifts do you receive from those practices? How did you come to learn how to be Still? Who in your life might you encourage to learn how to be Still that could use the benefit, and the rest?