2 entries for Sunday, January 9, 2022

[The idle mind is not of the devil but of God. By being empty we are able to receive.]

[You don’t sleep by doing anything: when activity stops, you simply go into sleep.]

[Relaxation means the moment is enough: feeling yourself, and being present is so satisfying it’s too much.]

[Activity is goal-oriented and constantly turns the present into a means for the future, thus ensuring relaxation remains on the horizon and never comes.]

[The celebrator doesn’t need to create anything because everything already exists and they are grateful for the abundance.]

[Don’t desire anything, including spiritual things, God, or liberation. When you are desire-less, the seed explodes.]

We’re accustomed to carry out activities with some kind of objective. Normalizing this makes it uncomfortable when nothing is being accomplished. Finishing something early and confronting stillness and silence invokes a reflex to fill space by checking your phone or notifications, distracting yourself for fear of a void. It feels wrong to simply breathe, stretch, exercise, practice capoeira movements outside the context of a structured activity: “can’t just sit and breathe for the rest of my life, gotta actually do something”. Nothing is possible without breathing: mental and physical health is necessary for accomplishing anything, so it’s strange that we’re afraid to connect with it in an unstructured context.

Each moment of stillness is actually a gift: we can celebrate an opportunity to focus on the gaps. We’re always breathing in the background, so stopping gives us a chance to pay attention to the whitespace, or darkspace. Enjoy connecting with it like meeting an old friend. The tendency to ask “I did my breath, now what?” might be an anxiety about the activity not having a well-defined start and end time, so we can practice being there without expectations, and when something compels us into action, we are free to move on.