11/02/2025
What Is Stillness?
What truly is stillness? What are the fluctuations of the mind?
And how can awareness of both help us?
Yoga teaches us that:
“Yoga is the cessation (nirodhaḥ) of the fluctuations (vṛtti) of the mind-stuff (citta).”
(Yoga Sutra 1.2)
It’s probably the most cited—and perhaps the most important—sutra in the entire path of yoga.
But what does it really mean? And what does it have to do with stillness?
Most people, when they think of meditation, believe it means getting rid of all thoughts or sitting in perfect silence.
How do I know? Because this is exactly what people tell me when they first start to learn.
They think, “I can’t stop my thoughts, so I must be doing it wrong.”
But as many great teachers remind us, meditation isn’t about getting rid of thoughts—it’s about changing our relationship to them. Thoughts arise naturally, like waves on the ocean. What yoga teaches is how to rest in the awareness beneath those waves.
As I sit in my backyard tonight, I’m contemplating some deep pain and sadness. The pool before me is quiet and still, yet I know its water is alive—molecules constantly moving, currents shifting invisibly beneath the surface.
Beside it, the hot tub ripples gently—no jets on, just small undulations catching the light. The contrast reminds me of the ocean when I dive:
on the surface, the waves may crash and churn, but as soon as I descend, just a few feet down, everything becomes calm.
There’s movement everywhere—fish darting, plants swaying—but the feeling is stillness. Not the absence of motion, but the absence of disturbance.
The Mind and Its Depths
The mind is like that ocean. On the surface, the vṛttis—the thought-waves—rise and fall. They’re not “bad.” They’re simply what the mind does.
Without the mind, we couldn’t think, plan, create, or love. But unless we learn how to relate to it with awareness, it can pull us into its turbulence.
Stillness, then, is not a blank screen. It’s the depth beneath the movement—the awareness that watches, without judgment, as thoughts come and go.
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