Stillness Saves

Tolle writes that stillness will save the world. I don't know if that is true. But stillness is saving me. Every morning I wake up and stand, stillness grounds me. It builds a hub of awareness in me. If I make a conscious effort to pay attention to the silence and to the post of energy that holds me up, I feel the particular pleasure of stepping out of mental conditioning. If for whatever reason, I forget to do that and start getting lost in my thoughts, stillness is still there working its way through my body, working its way through my psyche. As long as I maintain a strong devotion to stillness, I will lose myself less and less in the things that are weakening me, consumer culture, ego driven careerism, entertainment overload. I will return again and again to that place in me that is a rest from all of that, and in time none of those things will have the power to drive me.

Timelessness

It happened this morning, this timelessness I've read about. I started standing at 6:30, and it was like the next minute I looked up and it was 7:15.

This has much to do with a decision I made yesterday to think of the real me a pure awareness and not this conditioned thinking. To not see meditation as an escape, but to see thought as the escape. This doesn't mean that to be myself I have to spend all day standing. It just means that I need throughout the day to regularly take the time to be still, so that my thoughts serve me rather than drive me.

When I really spent this meditation coming back to my true self, standing quiet, listening to the morning silence, deeply still, all the usual markers of time--boredom, the urges to get back to important thought using tasks--lessened. There was no need for time. There was just now.

An exciting thought

"When you become aware of silence, immediately there is that state of inner still alertness. You are present. You have stepped out of thousands of years of collective human conditioning."

I've been reading Eckhart Tolle's Stillness Speaks. Tolle believes that stillness will save the world. This is a hard thing for me, child of busy journalist/activist/professor types, to accept. That is might be inaction, not action that will create a better world. But what Tolle says, what he conveys about the excitement of stepping out of conditioning, speaks deeply to the heart of my practice. I have felt those moments, those thrilling moments of stepping out of the flow of habitual belief, routine, buzzing cravings and unhealthy worries. They are what keep me coming back to this again and again.

The day my anxiety died

A couple of years back I wrote a post about the night my depression died. I was standing, in the middle of the night, up because of some insomnia thing. Somewhere near the end of what had been an extremely relaxing, deeply calm stand, I suddenly felt this buzz of anxiety, and then the smokey despair of the chronic depression I'd been struggling with all my life. I felt it flare up, and then I pretty much felt it burn away, replaced by a deep sense of calm.

This isn't to say that after that day I never felt depression again. But I can say, that it's never driven me, or controlled me in exactly the same way since. I visit that murky path from time to time, but I know it's growing over more all the time.

Last week has been an extremely difficult one. My landlady gave me official notice that she's going to take back my apartment. Doesn't look, from what an experienced tenant's rights lawyer told me, that she has much chance of pulling it off. Still, I've been obsessively anxious about this for a week. It's been difficult to sleep, work, and very difficult to meditate. I've been in imaginary rental board hearings now for a week, and any actual rental board hearing is months away.
Today I stood. I heard my most compassionate voice reassuring me "you don't have to be driven by this obsessive anxiety. You don't have to be driven by this obsessive anxiety. You don't have to be driven by this obsessive anxiety. Obsessive anxiety helped you once. But it's not helpful to you anymore. You don't have to be controlled by this." Then I thought, who is this you that the voice keeps talking to. And I realized that I didn't want to think of myself anymore as the helpless person, who needs reassurance from a secondary voice. I thought "wait a minute. I'm the strong voice that's reassuring me. I'm not the child who needs reassuring anymore." So I started being this voice and I started hearing myself say: "I don't need to be driven by obsessive anxiety anymore." The voice got stronger and started to feel like more and more of a core part of my identity. Until it was.

For a while, just after that stand, I sat down. I started thinking about a time in my life when maybe that obsessive anxiety did help me. I thought of my childhood, always on attention. Always expecting my mother pounce any moment with some overblown irritation of some sort. I needed to be obsessively anxious, it felt like, to match her obsessive anxiety.

But she's not here anymore. This is my life. I'm not always doing something wrong. I'm often doing something right. Something healthy. Something smart. Something interesting. Something delicious. I don't need to be worried ALL the time. I don't need to be controlled by that worry.
This doesn't mean I'll never worry anymore. But I'm about to lose my home, one of the worst feelings in the world. And I'm up to it. I'm up to the fight of protecting myself and my son. And maybe, eventually I'll even feel secure enough to let my landlady have it. I'll see, once i'm more used to this knowledge.