Stillness

"My great task, and I'm doing much better at it nowadays, has been bringing in pausing. It really helps, because in all the things you have to do in your everyday material life, if you create these little magical pockets of pausing and populate that life, you have the mystical in the everyday. It starts to saturate the everyday, and then the everyday becomes mystical. The great epiphany for me is that they're not separate, and they never have been. There was a part of me that was divided early on, and slowly those two halves of me and my life have started to come together. It's a very lovely feeling. If someone hasn't found their purpose and they're interested, truly hungry to feel that inner sense of purpose and passion, I would invite them to learn about the art of contemplation, a contemplative way, and start creating spaces in their life so what's hidden inside them can emerge. This is the opposite of what most people do. We think if there's something we want, we have to go and find it out there. Finding one's purpose is the opposite. It has to emerge from within. It's part of our wisdom, our essence, our soul, so we have to slow down. In the beginning, taking those pauses takes discipline, day after day, but soon you create space where what's hidden inside you, that deep sense of being and purpose, starts to reveal itself. It may reveal itself in many ways. In one of those spaces, you might suddenly realize you've always wanted to learn the piano and decide to do it. There may have been a thousand reasons not to, but in that pause, the realization arrives. If you hadn't taken fifty pauses that month, you wouldn't have reached that one pause where it happened. You have to create these spaces. I invite people to begin that practice and watch the magic emerge. You need a little persistence and patience, because you don't know which pause it will happen in."