One of the key resistance points to mindfulness and meditation, especially meditation, is this sense that you are not doing anything and you should be doing something.
Many people struggle with the idea of sitting in a chair, alone, and doing nothing. It can feel like they are withdrawing from the world, in a bad way.
But to achieve stillness, you do not need to withdraw from the world. You simply need to be able to let go of distractions and be fully present.
To me, this image represents what it’s like to be “in the zone,” totally immersed in a single activity and have the rest of the world appear to recede.
Think about running at the water’s edge down a beautiful but utterly deserted beach. The light and temperature is just perfect. Your body is loose, limber and athletic. You feel as though you could run forever. Nothing else matters, and nothing intrudes on this moment. Your mind is quiet and calm.
This is the intersection of stillness and being fully alive. You did not withdraw from the world; you simply are giving all your energy and focus to a single activity.
When you are 100% involved in whatever you're doing it, it almost feels like time slows. Even difficult activities feel easy.
When you look at Olympic athletes before a competition, they often seem utterly immersed. They are visualizing what they want to do and how they are going to do it. They are literally running a race in their head, before the actual race… and they are doing it in front of thousands of spectators. To accomplish this, they must let go of everything except for… the race.
To translate these observations into your own life, you don’t have to lock yourself inside a room for an hour. You could just enjoy a few moments of stillness before a meeting or before you pick up the phone to call a client.
By being calm and focused, you will be able to harness more of your talents and to be better able to serve other people that you subsequently encounter.
To cite a personal example, on those days when I teach a workshop, I am most grounded, centered and fully connected with myself. I am 100% focused on what is happening in our room. Nothing else matters.
People think of stillness and aliveness as opposites, but the best moments in life occur when you bring them together. That is where the magic happens.
When you commit to one thing, it frees you up from worrying about everything else. You leave behind the hundreds of choices we must normally make each day. For whatever period of time you devote to one thing, you are both still and fully alive.
The distracted state into which many of us often slip is not the same as being fully alive… not even close. Instead, it is one in which one obligation competes with another and another and another. It is a superficial and generally unsatisfying way to exist.
Stillness gives you space to fully experience yourself and a single moment or activity. It gives you access to a higher level of awareness, and that often unlocks a higher level of human performance. With commitment comes the ability to devote every fiber of your being towards one activity. That is what opens the door to peak performance and the flow state.
Gautam Deviah leads mindfulness workshops for high-performance organizations and teams