Finding Stillness in a World of Distractions

So much of life is spent rushing around from one place to the next. We are rarely ‘here’ and so often distracted with our bodies doing one thing but our minds elsewhere - not to mention our spirit which, here in the west in particular, is so often forgotten.

We are disjointed and disconnected. We find it so hard to stay present and in the moment. It is no wonder that we find it hard to build and maintain deep, meaningful relationships. We drift through lives barely getting to know ourselves, so how could we ever truly know another?

When was the last time you sat down with yourself in silence and came to a place of deep, internal stillness? When was the last time you took your attention away from things in the outer world: bills, to-do’s and the news, and came back home to yourself?

We are all desperately trying to be seen and heard. It is why we act in such dysfunctional and nonsensical ways. For us to be seen by others we must firstly learn to see ourselves. We must be willing to strip back the veil of ego and look deeply into our own souls.

This is where the world that we have co-created together through generations does not help us on our own quests to find soul. For us to do this work to see ourselves, we need more time. For us to find the time, we believe that we have to work harder to buy it back. It is paradoxical.

Could it be, perhaps, that it isn’t that we need to work harder? Maybe we need to work less and simply to cut down on certain things in our lives: take away food, alcohol, materialism, doom-scrolling through social media, and insert any other act of avoidance here.

The problem, I believe, isn’t that we work too much. It is that our collective pain is so deep that it’s easier to go through life distracting ourselves from it than it is to stand and face it. Only when we find the courage to journey into the source of our pain do we give ourselves a chance of healing it.

The key, therefore, is to learn how to sit with, and be present with ourselves, to come back home to our centres; our bodies, and to do that without the mind being elsewhere and with awareness of our true spiritual nature. For us to increase our awareness of that, we must go outdoors into the world of Nature and find a place of stillness for a while.