To remain still is one of the fundamental conditions of contemplative practice, and yet it is also one of its fruits. Many of us will remember how hard it was to stay still as children, even –  maybe especially – when we were explicitly told to. And yet I found that when I as a child had no choice but to remain still, the effect of that simple action – or lack of action – had effects that remain with me to this day.

Before I turned five, I contracted meningitis, and spent what would have been my first year of school slowly recovering. I spent some of the most peaceful and untroubled hours of my life lying on a rug by the old apple trees in the orchard at the back of our house, under the endless vault of the open sky, listening to distant aircraft passing high overhead, or on a flaking stone bench on the patio, watching the little velvety red mites scampering in the sunlight. Time was unlike anything I’d known before, an open ground of appearing, empty of thought but fertile with becoming.

Mathieu Ricard writes (The Art of Meditation, p.93):

According to Buddhist analysis, the world is a result of the coming together of an infinite number of causes and conditions that are continually changing. Just as a rainbow is formed at the precise moment the sun shines on a collection of raindrops and disappears as soon as the factors that produce it are no longer present, phenomena exist in an essentially interdependent mode and have no independent and permanent existence. Ultimate reality is therefore described as empty of independently existing animate or inanimate phenomena. Everything is relationship; nothing exists in and of itself. Once this essential idea has been understood and assimilated, our erroneous perception of our ego and our world gives way to an accurate view of the nature of things and beings – wisdom. Wisdom is not a simple intellectual construction or a compilation of information. It arises from a precise methodology that allows us progressively to eliminate mental blindness and the afflictive emotions that derive from it and, in that way, free us from the principal cause of suffering.

So long as we act in the world from our own will and desire, our own imagined, illusory sense of what is real, the emptiness of forms (“independently existing animate or inanimate phenomena”) will be invisible to us. It is only when we keep still enough that the fragility and contingency of all that appears to be will become clear, like the settling out of sediment in a pond that has been disturbed but is now at rest.

It seems to me that, short of illness or some other unsought but somehow accepted immobility, stillness can only be found in some kind of practice; as far as I am concerned, the simpler the better. Choiceless awareness – just sitting, shikantaza – or the steady releasement of Gelassenheit, are the ways that open themselves to me; gateways into silence and stillness so plain and simple that anyone can use them, regardless of skill or training. All that is needed is regularity and time – faithfulness, if you will – given to the simplest practice, for the “vast and shining presence that is the very source of our being” (Tara Brach) to open around us.