3 Things We Can Learn from Sitting in Silence

Mindfulness is all the rage these days. It was on the cover of Time Magazine. Ellen and Oprah are meditating. Dozens of books about mindfulness are published every month. We hear about scientifically proven benefits of meditation —less stress, less anxiety, more happiness, it will physically alter your brain. Mindfulness treats depression, panic attacks, it helps with attention, it stabilizes your mood. Scientific studies are multiplying. While you are reading this sentence there is a study being published and that study surely documents that yet another type of meditation is useful for yet another burning problem.

Let me tell you a secret: very few people actually meditate. Frequently they just read about mindfulness, but never get around to actually doing it. Or they will say something like “jogging is my mindfulness” or “cooking is my meditation”. What people usually mean by this is that they find certain activities relaxing or absorbing, or they capture their attention more easily than some other activities. This, however, is not mindfulness. Mindfulness is the cultivation of awareness of how your experience unfolds from moment to moment. Now. And now. And, of course, now. It’s not necessarily about feeling relaxed. Quite the opposite is frequently true, as every experienced mindfulness practitioner will tell you: our present moment experience can be very unpleasant. Mindfulness is about staying with that experience and observing it, even (or especially) when it’s not pleasant.

Jon Kabbat-Zin, one of the pioneers of mindfulness in the West, once wrote that mindfulness is simple but not easy. The concept is truly simple enough — sit, close your eyes, follow your breath, and when your mind wanders, gently return to the breath. Take 5 minutes to try it out, and you will soon realize that simple concept is not the same as easy execution. Being persistent and patient pays off — mindfulness is a life-changing gift, least of all because of its scientific benefits. I will share three most important insights I received from my decade-long daily mindfulness practice.

Insight #1 Nothing stands still

I sit on my zafu (fancy name for a meditation cushion) and observe my breath. First one is deep, second one equally deep, followed by a shallow one; then, my breath deepens again. Slowly, I start noticing that my expirations are getting longer, and I become aware of pauses between breaths, and their lengths vary for no apparent reason. There are sounds around me. Car is approaching, sound is getting louder, then slowly disappears; again, everything is silent. My body works hard to produce infinitely many elusive sensations, all of which keep changing. There is nothing inside my body or outside of it that stands still. Everything is in motion. The world outside, and me. In the words of George Kelly, I am also a form of motion.

Why is this important, you may ask?

If you see the world as being constantly in motion, you tend to realize that whatever you think about it is always subject to change. What you know to be true today, may not be so tomorrow. So, you surrender to this flux and start looking at your opinions as if they were your theories about the world. If they don’t fit, it’s possible for you to throw them away and create other, better theories.

Without this insight we tend to “stick to our guns” and refuse to change. When our thinking doesn’t catch up with the world, we become increasingly frustrated and angry. Understanding how fundamentally fluid everything is, brings about a dose of calm — things don’t have to be the way we want them to be.

Insight #2 Why so serious?

Let’s keep developing the first insight and see how it leads us to the second. The world is in motion. I am a part of the world. Therefore, I am also in motion. Always, even now.

If I am also a form of motion, that means that my thinking about myself must also always be in motion. In fact, I may already not be who I think I am or who I was 5 minutes ago.

When this insight translates into your daily life, you tend to be less certain about who you really are. That means you don’t take yourself all too seriously. If you stop taking everything so seriously, you will be able to find humor in your own failures, and joy in the most unexpected aspects of your daily experience.

You won’t be shackled by your identity; instead, your identity will be in service of your satisfaction. This seems like a particularly important point in today’s world where we take identity as being something essential. With regular mindfulness practice you begin to see it as a set of choices and social circumstances, rather than your essence. It’s something that ought to serve us, and it frequently turns out to be the other way around.

Insight #3 Resisting change causes suffering

Whereas we can’t avoid pain in life, suffering is optional. What do I mean by this? On the most basic level, mindfulness is about accepting our experience, whatever our experience may be. If you do your daily sitting in an uncomfortable position, your experience will possibly include a dose of pain, or at least, discomfort. Once the pain arises in your awareness, you can try and push it away, and fail because experience can’t be pushed away, but in the process of trying to push it away, you will suffer because of your failure; alternatively, you can try and embrace the pain. To embrace doesn’t mean to enjoy, the same way accepting doesn’t mean approving. To embrace pain means to be able to sit with your pain, accept it as a part of your current experience, it means being able to observe it closely. Much like everything else, pain will evolve and change too.

The first insight was about the world being in perpetual motion. The second insight was about us as persons being in perpetual motion. The third insight is about the inevitability of accepting an implication of those first two insights — we have to change, and this change can never stop, because the world will never stop. Each time we begin resisting change, suffering arises.

Insights can be intellectual, and this is perhaps what you could have gotten from this article. (Or at least I hope so.) Intellectual insights are useful starting points, but they are rarely life-changing; most people can say “what is wrong with them” and how they should change, but this is rarely enough for them to actually begin changing. Reaching these points over and over again through a sustained, patient mindfulness practice is a way to begin living these changes, as being present and aware allows you to carefully examine every minute aspect of your experience. There’s a lot of experience to examine. Start now. All you need is to close your eyes and focus on your breath; it’s that simple — but not that easy.