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Stress, Space, Silence, Stillness

Who gets stressed?

I do!

It appears within me in various forms, some obvious, some subtle. It can be short-lived or long-term, it can present in my body, mind or both. It ranges from irritability, impatience, nervousness, tension, overwhelm, dizziness, and sometimes it feels like it’s pinning me down.


Quite often, in the presence of stress, our attention or experience can get forced up towards our heads and thinking. We become ‘heady’.

We feel tension in the head, face, neck and shoulders. After a while we may also feel quite fatigued which doesn’t seem to help in our ability to manage it.

One of the simplest ways to manage some of the stress is to ‘enter’ the body.

We can begin to drop our attention downwards, into the body, spreading it through different senses like bodily sensations, the breath and even smell and sound.

We become curious of what it feels like to be here and now.

We are not pushing anything away. We are not seeking anything. We are simply noticing, without preference.

When we spread our attention like this we create and connect with inner space.

This space is always here - as the backdrop of every object of experience. Much like silence is the backdrop of every sound.

In fact, space and silence share many experiential characteristics - they ‘feel’ the same - like stillness.

These words may seem vague or strange, but what they are pointing to is an experience beyond thinking.

The attitude that connects us to this stillness is - allowing or acceptance.

When we drop away the layers of thinking and doing, when we stop comparing this moment and ourselves, to anything else, then stillness is waiting for us - it is our nature.

There are times when emotion is so strong that we struggle to feel or connect with this stillness. This is why it’s so helpful to practice it regularly, we get better at it, we become familiar with it.

Life is never going to be plain sailing, we know this deep down. Our conditioning, environment and genetics determine so much of our experience. There’s lots going on that is out of our control but we readily take responsibility for it, then beat ourselves up or feel bad about it.

I sometimes see myself as a baby in a push chair struggling under the illusion I’m in total control of the journey. It’s only when I learn to sit back and relax that I can really start to enjoy the ride.

When we recognise our inner stillness we begin to realise that what we’re actually in control of is vastly more powerful than what we think we’re in control of.



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