What is it about our modern culture that we have no place for stillness? No place, no space, little appetite nor room for stillness. For some people it appears to be nothing less than a cardinal sin to be doing “nothing,” to have “time on our hands” and to be sitting still.

Maybe it’s because we remember our school days when stillness was a punishment or when our parents and other elders longed for us to be still and we got the conscious or unconscious message that being still was a punishment for our aliveness that others seemed not to be able to cope with?

Maybe it’s our obsession about tangible productivity and needing to have tangible results fast? The obsession with the Yang way of doing things and measuring things and valuing things in society.

I was good at being still even as a small child. I remember being the winner or runner up on many occasions whilst playing Sleeping Lions or Statues at parties. I’d win other games too but these two games required you to be very still, not to fidget and to be as silent as silent can be.

Perhaps it’s in my genes to be still! Is there a stillness gene I wonder?

If I had the talent as a young child to be still, I had lost it by adulthood. I lost it for quite a long time in fact. Probably 25 years of lost stillness.

I fell prey to the belief that I had to be productive to make a worthwhile contribution and that only tangible, hard, measurable deliverables were acceptable and desirable. Under these conditions there was no place for stillness. Stillness was totally unacceptable unless you were asleep.

Stillness only made itself felt when I would be forced into it. This tended to happen at least once a year, often at the beginning of my spring holiday off work when I would get a mystery virus that the doctors couldn’t diagnose but which left me utterly exhausted and I would need to spend several days in bed recuperating from. Enforced stillness. Not enjoyable, not desirable, especially when you are supposed to be on holiday having a good time.

So when did stillness become a pleasure for me? It was really only this year that I began to seek out stillness. It began as a knowing that I needed stillness. Then it became a longing. Now I was listening and now I was considering how best to meet my longing when it just happened one day that the longing took preference over the tangible to do list and I surrendered to my longing and sought a quiet space to sit down.

Now, I knew that I didn’t want to meditate yet I did know that I wanted to be still. And so I was still. For quite a long time really. I started with 10 to 15 minutes and within a week or so, I had managed a whole hour of gloriously blissful stillness. I managed to suspend all judgement about how unproductive it was and I surprised myself by immediately enjoying the experience and sinking into the feelings of surrender and peace that I was experiencing. And I discovered that I loved it. I loved being still. And so the beginnings of The Stillness Method were born within and through me. I kept coming back into stillness and as I did so, I began to get more and more insights into this new work.

Stillness, I discovered, is a lost art. It has been forgotten like so many great pieces of art. It is understated and undervalued in our society. It seems to have no place in our modern world. Yet, it may hold at least one golden key to help us thrive. And what is this golden key I hear you ask? Well, stillness puts us back in touch with our true nature, it gives us time to reflect and integrate our experiences and it begins to help us to know ourselves once again. For while we are busy running around with the tangible “stuff” of life, we run the risk of forgetting who we are, of losing our identity under a deluge of other people’s needs and expectations and we run the risk of wasting our precious energy.

In the stillness we recoup energy, we gain clarity and focus, we gain insight and intuitions and surely in this way we are being wisely productive.

So, Stillness is not about being asleep - it’s about being awake- wide awake and becoming more and more awake the more stillness we invite into our life. It helps us to become conscious human beings and connects us back to our true nature – who we really are when we strip away the layers of needs and expectations that we allow others to pile upon us.

So, I would like to challenge you to consider whether your doing activities and productivity are wise or whether it’s simply doing for doing’s sake?

How could you create just 10 minutes a day to dedicate to being still?

How could you introduce stillness in the workplace, at home, at play?

Go on, I dare you! Discover the lost art of stillness today and book a date with You!

I’d love to hear how you get on.