The greek word hesychia (ἡσυχία) is commonly translated as quiet or stillness. In Orthodox teaching it is often associated with the idea of nepsis (νῆψις), watchfulness. Grace settles over stillness, as the heart withdraws from its clinging and rejecting and its continual self-comparison. If we can keep still enough, and merely watch, the sediment of self-concern will precipitate out.

Martin Laird writes (An Ocean of Light: Contemplation, Transformation, and Liberation, p.74):

We can just begin to see how contemplative practice gently loosens the knot of ego and calms the spasms of reactive mind. When we return our attention to our practice as soon as we are aware that our attention has been stolen, ego is less and less the focus of our attention. The television screen in our heads will continue its constant stream of noise and images. The more we watch and listen to it the duller we feel, a dullness we take to be normal. We grow bored with constantly flipping through channels in search of something that might, one of these rounds, land on something that gives us a sense of being alive instead of being deadened by the din of our minds. The practical answer is simple: let the television play. Simply don’t watch it. Gradually (neither in a day nor in a short while) the light of awareness begins to shine through this mental clutter and we begin to realize that the derived identity provided by ego no longer has the ring of truth. “We need to guard,” [Christian] Bobin says, “not only against the world, but against our preoccupation with ourselves, another door by which the world might creep back into us like a prowler into a sleeping house.”

Practice is like this. Regardless of why we thought we began in the first place, only in quiet persistence, rather than in mental heroics and spiritual metrology, can the heart be still enough for grace to break through like sunlight through the overcast.

Behind the hours of practice there is a quiet, luminous stillness; it is always there, has always been there, only we had forgotten it among the “noise and images”. Practice, it seems to me, is perhaps no more than a means – whichever means we have found fits us best – of keeping quiet; for it is only in quiet that we are able to open to the grace of that luminous stillness. This conscious state of illumination (often referred to by Catholic writers as “contemplation” or “infused contemplation” – as opposed to “contemplative practice”) is a gift. It cannot be achieved. It seems to me that intent needs simply to disappear in the practice of contemplation. How this is to be achieved is indeed a paradox: the falling away of purposive action isn’t an achievement at all. An achievement would be the result of purposive action. But nevertheless the absence of intent, replaced with simple dwelling in stillness, in the presence of what is, now, is the only way I know to becoming vulnerable enough to be available to illumination – to the light of the open ground itself.