The big value of Stillness

“True intelligence operates silently. Stillness is where creativity and solutions to problems are found.”

Eckhart Tolle, Stillness Speaks (2003)

Those still moments in your day are very precious. It is very important to have time in each day where you have that quiet stillness in your body and your mind.

In those moments you will think clearer and be closer to the real solution to issues and problems that you have to solve.

Rather than thinking through everything. You stop, be still, be blank, allow space and time for things to reveal themselves in a new way. It is a reset of your normal habitual pathways and programmed thinking.

By allowing stillness you affirm that there is an intelligence far greater than thinking thoughts which also exists. If you don’t believe this, you will highly likely never allow your mind to be still.

But this stillness time is vital to your health, productivity and fulfillment in life.

So, have you taken time out today to be still? If not, plan it in, make it important. You will progress much more smoother in life with such a practice.

If you are not used to it, stillness may initially look and feel like staring blankly into thin air or out of a window. If you haven’t practiced stillness much in the past you may find yourself drifting off. Your mental mind has been so over used with little pause, that it is exhausted when you stop and not think.

You haven’t used the pause button for so long that when you do, you feel the tiredness and habit of wanting to sleep or just staring blankly. That’s not quality stillness. That’s your body wanting to catch up, rest and recharge. So you may need to rest for a while before the quality returns and benefits are there. Although the resting will also be beneficial to your brain.

NEWS
For people in Melbourne, I will be appearing on a new TV show that started three weeks ago on Channel 31 titled Health, Wellbeing and Lifestyle.
It will air every Tuesday 12pm and repeat Thursdays 9am and Fridays 8.30pm.

I will appear in the following episodes (2019) and the topic:
Dec 24th Episode 5 – How we Heal
Dec 31st Episode 6 – Trauma (Biggest block to healing)
Jan 14th Episode 8 – Anxiety (Hyper Arousal)
Feb 4th Episode 11 – Depression (Hypo Arousal)
Feb 11th Episode 12 – Full Presence and Spirit

Each of my segments runs for around eight minutes. The show runs for 30 minutes. If you are not in Melbourne, the program will be streamed live and you can watch it here from Channel 31’s website.

Eventually these episodes will appear in my youtube channel.

How far ahead are you playing out your day?

On describing why he meditates, AFL Football player Zak Jones recently replied..

“I started very slow, but then it became before every game to clear my head and try not play out the game before it began.

For me it was enjoying this for what it is. There’s going to be highs and lows and if you’re worrying about what’s going to happen you’re not enjoying it.”

This leads to a great point that meditation helps reduce worry. How far ahead are you thinking throughout the day? Your body only needs to deal with this moment right now.

Anything more than this is extra stress that is not necessary. Future worry creates stress on your body that affects the quality of your present moment action right now. It also adds extra stress on your body, (which is responding like it is real.)

So how far ahead are you playing out your day right now in your head, while doing what you need to do in this moment? Bring all your thoughts right back to just this moment right now, reading this. These words right now. Nothing more.

If you manage to bring yourself back to this moment and just reading these words right now, you will find there is more enjoyment, doing just this moment. There is also more peace and quiet in your head because you don’t need to be thinking and worrying about the future right now.

When it’s actually time to plan your day, then that’s when you deliberately do it. Any other time, is just added body stress and wasted energy.

Mindfulness meditation helps to bring your mind and body back operating more from this present moment.

Distraction is the way we avoid our inner Pain

“As is the case with all human behaviour, distraction is just another way our brains attempt to deal with pain. If we accept this fact, it makes sense that the only way to handle distraction is by learning to handle discomfort.”

Nir Eyal, indistractable, (2019)

Stopping, closing your eyes and meditating on your inner world isn’t always comfortable if you are doing it for self healing. There will be times when uncomfortable feelings and sensations arise. And these will arise when you are disciplined enough to stay with your practice long enough, that you go deeper.

Going deeper isn’t always comfortable. When you have the first sign of an uncomfortable feeling you can tend to 1/ Distract yourself from feeling the pain. 2/ Stop sooner and open your eyes, 3/ Switch to focusing on the thoughts in your head rather than your body or 4/ Leave your body entirely and float off.

All of these are escapes from feeling what’s actually going on in the present moment in your body now. You cannot heal further if you don’t accept and allow the deeper pain to release.

Feeling the difficult feelings is the key. Making it okay to feel what is there in manageable doses. Accepting that they are normal. Staying with the body part and sensation helps to keep you out of your head. Adding a story about the painful feeling doesn’t help. Feeling it directly in your body is what helps it move and release the most.

It is okay to feel difficult and painful feelings. They are part of the human condition. Ignoring them will likely just create more problems later that you don’t need. So allowing pain, fear and anger to arise without judgment, in manageable doses, can go a long way to releasing painful feelings easily.

As you accept and release the discomfort, you will need to distract yourself less. So it becomes easier to stay on task and follow through on commitments.

Mastering Stillness and Speed

“Stillness is what aims the archer’s arrow. It inspires new ideas. It sharpens perspective and illuminates connections. It slows the ball down so that we might hit it. It generates a vision, helps us resist the passions of the mob, make space for gratitude and wonder. Stillness allows us to persevere. To succeed.”

Ryan Holiday, Stillness is the Key, (2019)

Stillness is vastly underrated. Although with mindfulness this is now slowly changing.

There is an amount of speed that is optimal when doing and working that allows us to get a lot done without too much stress. At some point additional speed doesn’t help to get more done. That’s where more mistakes creep in, thinking jumbles, creates drama and the effort creates more costly maintenance and wastes time.

Conversely, there is an optimal stillness level. Where things slow down, get into focus, thinking clears, more intelligence and creativity are freed up and new ideas and solutions are hatched. At some point any additional stillness creates complacency, laziness, disengagement, over drifting and stuckness as momentum grounds to a halt and direction is lost.

How do you make sure you stay in that optimum range? Also how do you make sure you don’t stay stuck in speed or stillness too long? You need the alternating flow of both, in that optimum range for the best productivity and best use of your time and energy.

We have been culturally stuck in that high gear speed for too long and not nearly spending enough time cultivating the power of stillness.

Stillness allows you access to your depth and to more time in the present moment, within which everything gets done.

It is very important to make some stillness a priority in your day. It will sharpen your mind and help focus more of your doing and its speed.

Persistence always beats Talent

“As any coach or athlete will tell you, consistency of effort over the long run is everything.”
Angela Duckworth, Grit – The Power of Passion and Perseverance, (2016)

This is a great book, a massive best seller a few years ago (it remained on the New York Times best sellers list for 20 weeks. She also has 18 million hits on her TED talk on this subject.) This is great research on why some people succeed very well and become masters and experts in their field and why others with talent do not.

The key is finding your passion in a a field and then having persistence to keep practicing, learning and correcting (even when you fail or get it wrong) over many years.

Angela has created a grit scale test that can show you or a potential hire if that person will succeed in their field or job. Just having a high test mark from school or University doesn’t correlate with success on the job. But having perseverance and not giving up, does.

In order to not give up you must home in on your passion. The passion will give you the drive to persist, especially through the rough and down periods when things are not going well.

She summarises mastery into two equations:

Talent x Effort = Skill
Skill x Effort = Achievement


The more you practice and don’t give up, the higher the chance of achieving mastery in a field or job. Talent can help but it is the effort that really does it. In fact you can have very little talent up front but with persistent effort become a master in your field.

A lot of experts and geniuses in their fields actually got that way through huge long term effort and yet only had average talent in the beginning, if that.

The same with Mindfulness practice – the more you practice, the more you will learn and correct, and in the long run, mastery will be there.

The Stress and Trauma of Modern Times

“Mindfulness involves paying attention to something, in a particular way, on purpose, in the present moment, non-judgementally….You actually have to tell your brain that is your intention. It won’t know what you’re doing, and it will priorities its activities based on your emotions or your mental energy or your physical needs.”

Stan Rodski, The Neuroscience of Mindfulness, (2019)

Another good book released earlier this year on mindfulness. A psychologist/cognitive neuroscientist, talks about the basics of mindfulness.

Unless you take control of your thinking mind, it will run you. Your conscious awareness needs to direct your thinking mind to stop. It doesn’t need to stop for long to de stress your over cluttered thinking thoughts. But stop it must.

Without conscious attention to stopping, your brain will run on auto-pilot and continue to rehash all the unresolved traumatic events of your past.

This fast paced period of time in our history is stressing your fight/flight emergency system out. Most of our stress is from past traumas where our nervous system has not fully come down from the high alert state, created by one event or the high level of continued pressure from many events, in our current environment.

TV news is traumatic to your body. Video and satellite crosses and instant transfer of bad news from any part of the globe was never there one hundred years ago. Now it is on tap, through TV, social media, radio, newspapers etc. And your body responds as if it is a secondary traumatic event happening to you now.

Witnessing a traumatic event can be just as traumatic to your body as actually being in the event.

So it is very important to consciously each day have the awareness to switch off and stop at some point, or at a number of points.

De stressing daily is vital to your health.

Men and Depression

This is a powerful speech at Danny Frawley’s Funeral today in Melbourne Australia by Wayne Schwass. See previous blog entry for more details of who Danny was.

Men need to have the courage to speak up and ask for help when something deep inside is not okay. Rather than being strong and covering up, be courageous and open up. Get help.

Learn to say NO to a lot of things

“…focusing on everything means focusing on nothing. It’s almost impossible to accomplish anything significant when you’re racing through an endless litany of tasks and emergencies. And yet this is how many of us spend our days, weeks, months, years – sometimes, our entire lives.”
(Michael Hyatt, Free to Focus, 2019)

I’ve talked about this information overload many times over the years. It’s a sign of the times. It is so important to be able to narrow down what you want to accomplish and then spend time just working on those specific tasks related to what you really want.

To do that, you have to constantly say NO to a lot of things that bombard you along the way. Your smart phone tends to be the biggest distraction. If your head is too much in control of your day, saying no will be very hard. But if you have a regular mindfulness practice, it makes it much easier to train yourself to switch off the distracting thoughts and the corresponding external information overload.

Having a deep connection to your internal world and internal space is very precious. The more body mindfulness work you do to inhabit/embody yourself, the more you will guard it, the more you will say No to things. The more focused you become on tasks and information that really matter to your goals.

Looking back, I found that the more connected I became to my body and inner self, the better choices I made.

I noticed I began to choose and do what worked rather than what was popular.

This is a very important point to make here. Your mindfulness meditation practice helps you access the real you. It helps you clear the way to accessing your true home, which is throughout your physical body. Then your guidance system becomes your own heart and not the ‘convincing’ information your head is brain-washed to need.

You are unique, a magnificent human being. Very precious. And the more you can embody this, the more unique choices you make, more often. Following the herd mentality, is not fulfilling, so that begins to lessen. You live a life that is much more rich and alive. One that actually contributes something special to the world that makes a real difference.

You have that in you.

Expanding your Brain in Real-Time

“The concept that mind creates matter is not a metaphysical proposition. It’s a biological one….your brain creates matter in the form of neurons and synapses in response to your consciousness.”
(Dawson Church, Mind to Matter, 2018)

Lots of research is coming out now (thanks to imaging machines and brain electromagnetic field readers) that the pathways in our brain are changing in real-time.

What you think and focus on affects the neuron structures in your brain directly, then and there. (Not just when you are asleep at night.) The rewiring is happening live as you focus intently on a task. The longer and deeper that you can focus, the deeper the neuron connections that can form in your brain.

Meditating in a Body Mindfulness Meditation class for one whole hour, and in the presence of other meditators, boosts this effect as everyone’s energy field resonates with each other, strengthening the effect.

This is why I also ask all clients at the end of a therapy session to not talk as they go home, and to lay down if possible when they get home. Most often people feel like doing this anyway. It’s a natural result of going deep. The energy your brain is expending in making neuron changes then and there is tiring. A good tiring.

You cannot feel the actual neutrons forming, there are no feeling receptors in your brain to let you actually feel this, but you feel the after effect in your body. You are tired, don’t want to talk and just want to lay down and often take a nap.

So after every deep body meditation and deep body personal therapy session, your brain has literally changed and the neuron connections in your brain have multiplied.

This is nice to know.

Your Practice, Your Spirit and your Better Health

“Recent research studies show that, on average, religious people suffer less from anxiety and depression than non-religious people; they are less prone to suicide, less likely to smoke, and less likely to abuse alcohol or other drugs.”
(Rupert Sheldrake, Science and Spiritual Practices, 2017)

Biologist and Biochemist Rupert Sheldrake has written some very interesting books over the years and this one is no exception.

Religious people seem to enjoy much better health and wellbeing because of their spiritual practices. Some of these practices involve meditation, gratitude, forgiveness and improving relationships.

It’s the meditation aspect that interests me here. Praying is a form of meditation, when a person slows down their thinking, closes their eyes and focuses on something other than their conscious thinking mind. Anything that takes you out of the conscious intellect for a little while and allows you to focus on your body, your surrounding space and other people, turns out, is very good for your health.

You don’t have to be religious to enjoy the benefits of body mindfulness meditation even though you can have experiences in the process that feel spiritual. The more you practice, as you become comfortable in just being in your body and your body heals further, you can begin (if you want) to expand out further outside your body and experience much more.

There is growing evidence that our minds can extend beyond our physical body. Through years of personal practice, this is certainly my experience. Sheldrake through his research coined the term morphic resonance to explain this link, and what a link it is!

More on this later.