Yesterday was the vernal equinox, one of two times a year that we have equal daylight and darkness. It is a symbolic time to consider how we can create balance in our lives, whether that is how we balance our career aspirations and our time engaged in hobbies, how we manage solo time versus being social, or, to continue on last week’s topic, how we balance tension and relaxation, or effort and release. Shifting to a more balanced way of living can be really uncomfortable for those of us who tend to give more weight to effort, striving, seeking and achieving, versus prioritizing spending time in stillness, reflection and releasing effort.
Finding more “release” isn’t as simple as what many people may offer as completely unhelpful advice like “just relax and everything will be fine.” In my experience, we need to do a little self-inquiry around why we find it difficult to relax, pause or take a moment of stillness when we are wired to keep going no matter how drained our batteries are or how little return we are getting on our investment of effort towards a goal. Though the simple phrase “just relax” is not exactly helpful, there is something to the paradoxical idea of letting go of effort versus ramping up effort to achieve our goals. Something magical can happen when we finally allow ourselves to take a pause and let go of the death grip we tend to have on our lives.
If you are able to embrace stillness, you’ll find what happens in those paused moments is that you get really clear on what you want, what’s been working and what isn’t working, and what you really need versus what you think you need. But getting this clear vision requires taking space and stepping out of the fray, which can be counterintuitive to certain personality types.
The first step in creating more balance is to reflect on whether you are the type of person who has an aversion to stillness. Do you find ways to stay busy throughout the day? Are you uncomfortable when there is silence or down time? Do you always feel like you “should be doing something?”
Do you have to always have music or the television or a podcast on in the background? There’s nothing wrong with having any of those things in your life, particularly if you are choosing them with the intention to provide enjoyment or to learn something or to laugh. But like any distracting or numbing technique, there could be an alternative reason that you are drawn to always having noise, sounds, distraction, activity, and for why you avoid stillness.
And what does it feel like to pause? Does it make you uncomfortable? When was the last time you tried to be still?
When I was completing my yoga training in India years ago, our local guide and spiritual teacher, Anand, posed a thought-provoking question. He asked, “do you know why people get so frustrated when they are stuck in traffic? It’s because we hate ourselves and we can’t stand to be alone with ourselves.”
Picture it–it’s gridlock on the freeway and there’s no apparent end to the sea of red lights streaming out in front of you. You are grinding your teeth, muttering or screaming profanities and calling the other drivers names. You are gripping the steering wheel and creating a cascade of tension throughout your body. You have no ability to self-regulate at that moment. You are trapped in a metal container with only yourself, frozen in a forced pause that you can’t escape. So why does this make us angry? Could it really be as Anand said, that we hate ourselves and can’t stand to be alone with our thoughts? It’s possible. Maybe hating ourselves is a bit extreme, but being uncomfortable with our thoughts is definitely a pattern we see in our culture. I know many people who can not handle sitting with their own thoughts and avoid it entirely. These are also the same individuals who really struggle with falling asleep at night because they can’t seem to turn off their brains (another symptom to check in on in your self-inquiry around stillness).
I have learned a lot about how we handle movement versus stillness by observing myself and others in the yoga studio. I taught Vinyasa yoga, which is a style of yoga where you are constantly moving, connecting one pose to the next while timing inhaling and exhaling with the movement. I would play this sort of game with my yoga students where we would do part of the yoga class in this flowing style–inhaling as your reach your arms overhead, then exhaling as you fold forward to touch your toes, then inhaling as you move into a high plank/push-up position, and exhaling as you move into downward-facing dog. With every breath you’re moving your body into a new position, so it’s this constant flow. After several minutes of this I would shift the focus for the next part of the class and ask the students to hold each of the postures for several breaths rather than move directly into the next pose. For example, we would get into a “warrior” pose, which is like a lunge with the front leg bent and the back leg straight behind like a kickstand, and arms reaching overhead. There’s quite a bit of tension that builds up in the legs and it requires a lot of effort to hold that position for a long time. The longer you hold it the harder it gets. It becomes challenging to breathe deeply, and you start to feel fatigue and maybe even a burning sensation in the legs. Your mind starts to focus solely on the time and you’re just waiting for the instructor to tell you when you can move into the next position.
This is yoga, so of course there’s a lesson to be learned when we are in these uncomfortable positions. The saying goes, “the moment you want to get out of the pose is the moment the pose begins.”
These static postures induce a mental test of your relationship with stillness. I would ask my yoga students to reflect on which part of the class felt more comfortable to them–was it when they were constantly moving and not staying in any one pose for a given amount of time? Or were they more comfortable in the stillness, when they could stay in one posture for a while, focusing on their breath.
Then there were the types of people who didn’t even try to hide the fact that they couldn’t sit in stillness. These individuals would roll up their yoga mats as fast as they could and bolt out of the room after the “active” portion of class was over, skipping the ever-important “final relaxation” pose (savasana). This always made me chuckle–I wanted to tell them, “you know, this is probably the most important part of the class for someone like you…” But something told me they wouldn’t really hear me even if I had said that to them.
Within our society most people are more comfortable when they are moving because there isn’t time to think about things that we may not want to acknowledge. There are also external pressures that drive us away from stillness, rest and relaxation. We are often expected to drive forward towards the next task, goal or project when we haven’t even tied a bow on the last thing we’ve accomplished. Taking that space between activities is a really important practice. It allows time for reflection, closure, assimilation of learnings and a moment to “enjoy our achievements as well as our plans” (a quote from the poem “Desiderata”). Also, any time we are able to move to the side of relaxation, we can lighten up on the tension side of the see-saw.
If you’re curious about exploring your relationship with stillness, challenge yourself to be in silence, even for a few breaths or a few minutes. Set a timer and see what starts to come up for you during those moments. Is your mind racing through a to-do list the second you shut off any external noise/distractions? Are there worries, fears or anxieties that pop up and do you immediately want to suppress them or drown them out? What if you could just be an observer of your thoughts, without judging them or giving power to them?
Here’s a simple mindfulness exercise I would use at the end of my yoga classes that can help you with this:
Get comfortable, lying down or seated, eyes closed if that feels okay to you. Take a few deep breaths, and then just let your mind start to do what is natural, which will likely be to start shooting thought arrows at you in rapid succession. As thoughts arise, imagine yourself as separate from those thoughts (because you are), and just take notice of them without judging them.
Imagine you are sitting next to a stream, and there are beautiful leaves of every color floating down the stream. Consider that your thoughts are the leaves–they float by, you notice them, but then they continue downstream and are out of your sight. Let them flow by without getting attached to them. If there is a thought that seems to keep coming up, like a leaf stuck in an eddy, swirling around, stuck behind a tree branch or a rock, pluck the thought leaf out of the stream, hold it in front of you, examine it, turn it over, acknowledge it and then gently place it back in the stream and let it float away.
It would be unrealistic to expect that we can completely clear our mind of thoughts, but if you can create more and more space between the thoughts, if the number of leaves become fewer and appear with more distance between them, you’re making progress towards being comfortable in stillness and finding those pauses and spaces that will allow you to see yourself and your world more clearly. You will also recognize that your thoughts are separate from your self, and that you have full control over your reaction to those thoughts.
Taking a pause, sitting in stillness, observing our thoughts and acknowledging the ways we distract ourselves when we are uncomfortable being alone with those thoughts all lead us to a place where we can start to loosen the tension of effort and invite in more of the relaxation and space that brings balance and clarity to our lives. Eventually we will no longer fear those moments of silence and stillness, but instead lean into them and hear the whispers that arise when can finally hear our own inner wisdom. This is where the magic happens.
“The moment I let go of it was the moment I got more than I could handle. The moment that I jumped off of it was the moment that I touched down.”
Alanis Morissette
Here’s to taking the brave step of letting go and enjoying the abundance that flows in the wake of stillness.