Quotes About Stillness

I have learned some things about pain through my sitting practice. If I move to adjust my posture prematurely, the pain will chase me wherever I go, but if I just sit still when the pain starts, it often goes away, or recedes into the background.

No sleeping in the places of death.

She sat very still, listening to a stream gurgling, the breeze soughing through upper branches, the melodious kloo-klack of ravens, the nyeep-nyeep of nuthatches - all sounds chokingly beautiful. She felt she could hear the cool clean breath of growing things - fern fronds, maple leaves, white trillium petals, tree trunks, each in its rightful place.

Oh, be quiet, Fo-Fo.

Quedarse quieta significa morir.

clasp the flask between my hands even though the warmth from the tea has long since leached into the frozen air. My muscles are clenched tight against the cold. If a pack of wild dogs were to appear at this moment, the odds of scaling a tree before they attacked are not in my favor. I should get up, move around, and work the stiffness from my limbs. But instead I sit, as motionless as the rock beneath me, while the dawn begins to lighten the woods. I can't fight the sun.

She tried to keep busy, but each afternoon she was drawn into the courtyard or up into the pavilion, where she sat as still as a pool of water. It was as if she feared she'd fly away into a million pieces if she moved.

Even when he stands still, he moves. Baxter flickers everywhere and nowhere. A blink in a shuddering train window.

When the breath wanders the mind also is unsteady. But when the breath is calmed the mind too will be still, and the yogi achieves long life. Therefore, one should learn to control the breath.

In my dream I see the sea, the utterly calm sea. I see the coast, the utterly calm coast. When this utterly calm sea meets the utterly still coast, huge breakers are suddenly thrown up. Two sorts of stillness touch one and other and explode in roars and foam.

Meditation is a journey without movement. In the external world you have to move in order to go ahead, in meditation you don't move, yet you attain.

By concentrated meditation—in other words, by the stilling and focusing of the vibrations of consciousness (chitta vritti nirodha)—the individualized soul is enabled to reverse this process and thus perceive its subtler reality, its Divine origin, its true Self.

Happiness, therefore, is measured by the tranquillity of one's mind.

Still the bubbling mind; herein lies freedom and bliss eternal.

Complete peace equally reigns between two mental waves.

The mind is in its own nature when it is calm. The moment you can calm it, that [very] moment you will know the truth.

All this bringing of the mind into a higher state of vibration is included in one word in Yoga — Samadhi.

Sometimes you need to press pause to let everything sink in.

One of the best things to do sometimes is simply to be.

Silence is refreshment for the soul.

I believe silence is the greatest sound of all.

I don't know what silence sounds like anymore.

The most powerful forces in the universe are infinite. Love, imagination, intuition, stillness. Then why should we define our soul?

Their lips touched now, mouths pursed tight, their eyes open, both of them stock still. The moment held, a kind of such glorious confusion.