The Practice of Being Still

Photo by Emily Mitnick

I’ve begun an early morning yoga practice over the past couple of months that often begins before dawn. The moody, foggy, chilly San Francisco summer weather has inspired me to keep the shades drawn and practice by candlelight. First, I move intuitively, which sometimes looks like yoga asana, and other times looks like the fluid undulation of a kelp lasso under the ocean’s waves. Second, I sit — sometimes for five minutes, sometimes for twenty-five or more — transitioning my focus to sounds or breath.

These moments are delicious. Like stepping into a hot bath after a long day. Or drinking water after baking in the sun. A total surrender to support and pleasure and nourishment.

I’ve noticed that this practice has begun to simplify with each morning I unroll my mat. Just yesterday, I listened for sixty minutes only to Ravi Shankar’s beautiful recording of the mahamrityunjaya, a Sanskrit mantra recited to end cycles. Today, I moved for thirty minutes and sat for twenty, noticing where my breath was strained (chest, right side) and envisioning the flow of a clear, unencumbered river until I was able to embody that vision with my breath.

Oxygen. Prana. Freedom.

I write frequently about stillness, or rather, the practice of being still. I write about it because I spent much of my life with an underlying desire to be still and an overpowering fear that told me to fit in. And it wasn’t until I granted myself permission to be still that I could utter the words, I know myself, I trust myself and I love myself. Without ego. Without condition.

Rumi has a quote that I love. At my last job, I scribbled it out and tacked it onto the bulletin board at my desk. It goes:

Stop acting so small. You are the universe in ecstatic motion.

I’ve known this my whole life — that we are microcosms of the universe itself. I’ve known it because over the years, I had felt the pain of collision, stagnation and confrontation when the galaxies of the heart, mind and body weren’t in sync. I had also felt the rapturous flow when they were. But what I have come to know beyond a shadow of a doubt is that stillness opens the gates to my inner universe. It is in the unmoving silence that I can listen to its symphony and feel its vibrations.

I choose the practice of stillness. I choose the guidance of the stars within me. I choose to surrender to my truth that comes to me on notes of trumpets and cellos and choruses and pianos. I choose the painful knowing and the ecstasy of believing.

Back in Washington, DC, my teacher used to say, do it because it must be done. I didn’t understand what she meant until her words came to me before my morning ritual the other day.

It must be done, I thought. It must.

The warmest, most love-filled thank you to all who inspire me to practice stillness and who remind me that sometimes honoring the self means fitting “out” when others are fitting “in.” Om, shanti! Peace to the universe.

a san francisco year

emily mitnick // one millennial’s musings and meditations on a big life move

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