“Stillness is not a means to deny, submerge, or otherwise repudiate the self. It is simply through the wisdom of stillness we see that the self or the soul is healthiest and happiest when it is pointed outward rather than inward.”

Inner stillness: More than an antidote to anxiety

Inner stillness is prized throughout Marcus’ Meditations. More than as mere antidote to anxiety, the value of intentionally visiting stillness is the clarity it affords. Entering stillness through meditation or quiet contemplation reveals the kaleidoscope of distortions and fictions our minds selfprotectively conjure. Through stillness we are better able to see our circumstances as they really are.

Perceptions like that – latching onto things and piercing through them, so we see what they really are. That’s what we need to do all the time – all through our lives when things lay claim to our trust C to lay them bare and see how pointless they are, to strip away the legend that encrusts them. Meditations 6:13, trans. by Gregory Hays

How do we practice stillness?

I don’t think there is one best way. However, setting ourselves up so we won’t be disturbed, lying down or sitting with eyes closed sends a signal to our bodies and minds to orient themselves intensively rather than extensively. This is an important counterweight to the extensive pull of digital media and other prevalent hyperlinked ways of thinking that have become so rapidly normalized with great cost to our ability to focus.

From the outside, taking the time to be still could be misunderstood as a passive retreat reserved for the leisured and well-heeled; perhaps a luxury state akin to visiting a spa that protects one from engaging with the problems of the world, so as to focus on yourself over being responsible to others. Not so. The practice of seeking stillness can make us more responsible, more effective, more compassionate, and more involved in righting the world’s wrongs. A settled mind is a more constructive and compassionate mind.

Stillness as ‘unselfing’

Stillness gives rise to what philosopher and novelist Iris Murdoch called “unselfing”. Unselfing results from quieting down enough to step back from the dramatic epic stories we conjure starring Me, Myself, and I. We can disentangle ourselves from our vanities, resentments, and outsized ambitions enough to see that rather than locating ourselves at the center of our understanding of the world, we instead shift our attention to the quality of our relationships with others and with Nature/ God that confer meaning and fulfillment. Unchecked self-focus is the source of so much suffering, because it isolates us from our actual sources of nourishment: our connections.

Transcending the self

When we “unself ” we can look outward where meaning is made and meaning is found. As psychotherapist Viktor Frankl so beautifully put it, “we should not ask ourselves what we want from life. We should ask ourselves, what does life want from us”. Frankl further said, “Being human is always directed, and pointing, to something or someone other than oneself: to a meaning to fulfill or to another human being to encounter, a cause to serve or a person to love.” Frankl called this "selftranscendence," perhaps another way of saying “unselfing,” or in a Stoic idiom, “flourishing”.

Stillness points us outward

Stillness is not a means to deny, submerge, or otherwise repudiate the self. It is simply through the wisdom of stillness we see that the self or the soul is healthiest and happiest when it is pointed outward rather than inward.

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Sharon Lebell is the author of The Art of Living: The Classic Manual on Virtue, Happiness, and Effectiveness, the first modern interpretation of Epictetus’ teachings. She Tweets@SharonLebell.

 

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