For many years in my youth I trained as a dancer – primarily ballet with a good dose of modern dance and a splash of everything else.  One thing that teachers and choreographers start to talk about when you’re a more experienced dancer is quality of movement. Not just what is the shape, what direction does it move, how do you do it, but once you are proficient at it, how do you change the quality of movement. Is it slow, smooth, light, airy, abrupt? The list goes on and on.

Stillness, much like movement, has qualities. There is the stillness of grasping things that are moving and holding them still which is constraint. There is the stillness of things that should flow being made unable to move, which is stagnation. And then there is the kind of stillness I mean when I write about sitting in silence and stillness.

When I talk about stillness, I mean a quieting of self, an opening up to allow natural flow without focusing on it. I mean the quietness of slow, even breathing – not unmoving  as lungs expand and contract and air flows in and out, but still nonetheless. I mean allowing thoughts to move aside for something deeper than thinking. I mean dwelling, for a little while in peacefulness; Chosen quieting, intentional settling into silence, both internal and external. Typing this I see that there are qualities of silence, too. Silence can a chosen lack of language, a silence that denies all sound, a tense silence, an angry silence, a peaceful silence.

It’s easy to throw language around, but these words mean something specific. Sitting still, fuming mad with my eyes clamped closed and my lips firmly shut is, technically stillness and silence. And yet, it bears no resemblance to the stillness and silence that feeds us and opens us to being able to engage with the more deeply world around us.