Rest in the Stillness

When you meditate, that is what you are doing. You are allowing your thoughts to start to settle. Maybe they seem churned up at first and every so often they get kicked up again, but gradually they start to settle and you have the sense that in you is this stillness. There is a place inside you that, even when your mind or emotions are in turmoil, is always still, is always at peace. And in meditation you are reaching down to be more in touch with that, to find that stillness and rest there.

This shouldn’t imply that you can do this only when you are meditating and physically sitting and resting. You can rest in the stillness no matter what you are doing—whether you are talking, walking, working, cooking, gardening, driving—part of you, the part of you that is still, that is at peace, is still there. And “resting” in the stillness means having put roots there, so that even though your body is in motion, your mind is in motion, your emotions are in motion, you keep in touch with the part that is still. You want to put roots there so that stillness is within your field of awareness even as these other things are going on. You are keeping it within focus, you are keeping it as part of the picture.

In doing that, you are doing it all. You’re resting in the stillness, you’ve put roots there, it is part of the picture no matter what your mind is doing, no matter what your body or emotions are doing. Once you are doing that, that’s it.

Part of putting roots in that stillness is the meditation, the repeated experience of letting your mind and emotions start to settle so that you can identify that place in yourself and get a sense of it, or at least get a sense of which direction you go to find it, what it means to go deeper. But it also involves a questioning, primarily of your sense of who you are. It means asking the question, “Who am I? Who am I really?”

Because to peel back all those layers of your sense of self, you will be getting closer and closer to the stillness. That’s the bottom; it’s the bottom of the ocean. It’s the ocean floor. When you rest in the stillness, you drop your anchor down to the ocean floor. Instead of having your anchor up on the ship so that you get tossed and turned with whatever storm comes along, with whatever current is pushing the boat, you put your anchor down and it keeps you from being totally drawn away by the storms of emotion, by the currents of thought, by the waves of physical desires or instinctual responses. You put your anchor down as deep as you can.

So you explore those depths while you are meditating, and then in your day-to-day life, when you realize your anchor has been drawn up, you try to let it go down again. When you are feeling agitated about something, pause, take a breath, and let that anchor start to descend again toward the ocean floor, toward the stillness. Bring that part of yourself back into the picture.

Now sometimes you find you have been carried off by some current and drifted a long way from where you want to be, even though you thought your anchor was on the ocean floor. The anchor must have gotten hung up on something, so you put on your diving suit, jump in the water, follow the chain down and find, yes indeed, the anchor is all tangled up in a bunch of seaweed. What are you going to do? Well, you go down to that seaweed and you start to unravel it. You examine it, you take it strand by strand and unravel it from the anchor, until the anchor can drop more freely again.

What is the seaweed? The seaweed is a sense of self—always. You drop the anchor and think, “Well, now I’m resting in the stillness, my anchor is way down there, it’s on the ocean floor.” But then you discover that, no, it is not quite there because something is agitating you or something seems unsettled. Some greater depth needs to be explored, so you go down and examine: what is the anchor resting in if it is not the ocean floor? If it is not the stillness, even though it may be very deep, what is it? When you go down and examine it and try to get a sense of it, what you will always find is some sense of self.

An example: perhaps you find yourself worrying about the future, about what is going to happen to you as you get older. And this worry is preoccupying you and keeps coming up time and again, so you go down and examine: what is this sense of a vulnerable self composed of? Maybe it is memories of someone you were close to who had a hard time, an older relative you saw struggle and get sick, so you are imaging that happening to you, you are identifying with their experience. Or maybe the sense of vulnerability is from something difficult you yourself experienced in your childhood; if you didn’t feel safe as a child, maybe that is what this sense of self is composed of, and you are projecting that sense of vulnerability into the future.

To find the unique strands making up a clump of seaweed that has entangled your anchor, you have to patiently pull it apart until the anchor starts to come free and you can go deeper. To go deeper, you have to untangle it. You have to keep asking, “Who am I really? What is this sense of self composed of? Is it true, is it real? Is that all I am?”

We have all kinds of layers to our sense of self that we pick up over the years. Some we have created deliberately, trying to determine who we want to be and then finding models and patterning our life after them. Others come out of our experiences, or what other people have told us about who we are. There are a lot of different ways we appropriate layers to our sense of self, but none of them are the deepest part of us.

So discovering all these layers of self, untangling them, and letting your anchor drop deeper and deeper is what the whole journey is about. The circumstances of your life will give you plenty of opportunities to encounter that sense of resistance or drifting off course when the seaweed is entangling your anchor, if you just pay attention and question. Just rest in the stillness and disentangle your sense of self when you get stuck—then let the anchor drop deeper.

© 2010 Alan F. Zundel
 

Alan F. Zundel is a counselor, author, and teacher currently living in Eugene, Oregon. His talks are available to download for free at HeartAwake Center at www.heartawake.org.