How to cultivate silence in your life and spiritual practice

I'm laying in bed, the light is turned off and I'm staring up at the ceiling, taking in the darkness and listening to the silence.

My day starts this way and ends this way.

I didn't always appreciate the need for silence, the need to hold space with it, and allow it to take me into the mysteries of stillness while also allowing my thoughts to drift until all that is left is emptiness, but I'm appreciating this practice more and more because it allows me to begin and end my at peace, letting go of any attachments, emotions and events that might otherwise disturb the harmony of the moment.

A Cycle of Stillness and Movement

The blood of life and death anoints me as I surge in like the incoming ocean tide connecting you and I in an embrace of the Earth and Ocean. I flow out like the outgoing ocean tide but never so far out that we lose contact. I am poised, still, silent for a moment, held back but still touching then I surge in again penetrating the deepness of your red caves allowing the salt of my life to mingle with the power of your blood My waves roll over your fertile lands and then when I can go no further, I hold for a moment, still, silent, intense in this embrace and flow back out withdrawing, but never completely separated. I surge back in, movement incarnate and then stop, stillness profound. 0 and 1 Stillness and Movement Space and Time The rhythmic interaction between us is the mysteries of movement and stillness, space and time The mingling of us is possibility manifesting into reality through the plunging of the athame into the cauldron of creation. You and I become one, become zero, become one again. We are all things and none, reality and possibility merging into a confluence. I surge in and I withdraw, but I am never completely apart from you. You and I are a rhythm, a cycle, a dance of space and time, stillness and movement. You and I are 0 and 1. The doors of perception and possibility open to us and our cycle brings us to the heart of the universe the tao of stillness and movement each feeding into the other, an eternal cycle of possibility and reality that you and I play a small part in.

Movement, Stillness, and the Web of Space/Time

In Magical Identity I shared a technique I use for working with Space and Time, which is is the web if Space and Time. In this model the web is comprised of elements of space and time conjunctively connecting to manifest possibilities into reality. The strands of the web are elements of Time, while the nodes where the strands intersect each other are elements of Space. The strands of time represent possibilities and actions. I think of them as verbs. The nodes of space represent people, places, events, and things, nouns. I'm always open to improving on my techniques and my work with the element of movement gave me an insight in this technique that could be useful for developing it further.

While the strands of time denote possibilities and actions, it occurs to me that movement (and as I write this Stillness) are intrinsic elements of space and time that are not overtly recognized but that nonetheless play a role in our experience of space and time. I don't think of movement and stillness as being one and the same as time and space. And my experiences of both movement and stillness seem to bear this out. If anything it feels like stillness and movement act upon and are acted upon by space and time. For example, you might be tempted to associate stillness with space, but I'd argue that stillness isn't space. Stillness is a form of presence and awareness. It's potential and in some ways that makes it more related to time, but it isn't time either. It's a state of experience and being that can allow you to become aware of and experience space and time in different ways. When I do my practice of Zhine meditation, I am working with stillness and one of the experiences it can provide is an awareness of space and time that is different than what is experienced during the everyday experience of life. With Stillness, when I am focusing my awareness on myself and a particular object, I experience not just the object as it is, but also the possibilities for that object. I experience the space of the object, as well as the time of the object. You also might be inclined to associate movement with time, and certainly experience of time can be that of a sense one moment passing into another, but again you can also experience time via stillness.

So all that said, what I'm really interested in is how I can factor stillness and movement into the work I do with the web of space and time. I don't want to associate stillness or movement with specific aspects of the web, and I don't think I need to, but I think working with them could allow me to enhance the technique as well as integrate these elements into my life. I decided to pull out my memory box, which is the physical representation of the web and when I worked with it this time, I approached the work in terms of movement. What did I need to move to put everything into the right space and maximize the right potential of time needed. Movement wasn't just about working with the strands of time, but rather working with the web as a whole, in terms of positioning the web and the respective nodes and time strands into an alignment that would be useful for better realizing the activation of a possibility into a reality. I didn't integrate stillness into this work, so when I experiment with it again, I'll work with both stillness and movement and see how they fit together with space and time.

What I've shared above is rough and I'll work on refining it, but I'm excited to be working on something new, or in this case a variation of something else I developed.

Book Review: The Slow Fix by Carl Honore

In this book the author explores the value of the slow fix, which involves learning how to solve problems from a process perspective instead of just trying to use a quick fix. The author explores a variety of elements that are integral to the slow fix process and uses case studies to demonstrate how those elements work together to bring about useful solutions to problems. I got a lot of value from this book by applying its principles to my business and my clients. I'd recommend it to anyone who wants to improve how problems are solved in general and in their organization, because what you will learn is how to examine your problem solving processes and introduce the right elements of the slow fix to help you improve on what you are already doing.