On Stillness

I’ve been sitting with stillness lately.

There’s a thing that happens in a long hold — thirty seconds, forty-five — where the body stops negotiating and starts listening. The noise inside doesn’t disappear. But you stop following it. Thoughts move through the way traffic moves past a window you’re sitting beside. You notice without needing to get in.

I used to chase stillness. The engineer’s instinct: identify the gap, close the gap. But stillness isn’t a gap to close. It’s more like a frequency you can tune to once you stop broadcasting over it.

What I’m working with now is this: the nervous system doesn’t know the difference between a tiger and a thought about a tiger. It responds to both the same way. The goal of practice — any practice, really — is to widen the space between stimulus and response. To train the gap.

Yoga is good at this. Not because of the poses. Because of the breath in the poses. You can’t do ujjayi breathing while your sympathetic nervous system is running. The two states are incompatible. The breath is the vote cast for the other state.

I walked to the market this morning and was already three blocks ahead of myself by the first intersection. Planning. Rehearsing. Body on the street, mind somewhere else entirely.

So I stopped. Stood on the sidewalk. Took three real breaths.

Forty-five seconds. Then the mind picked back up and I let it.

That’s it. That’s the whole practice.