The Hunter Who Sit’s Quietly In a Blind
We were not ‘designed’ for it.
It erodes our biological systems, strains the spirit and muffle’s the whispers of the soul.
For the deeper parts of us, often just ‘whisper’.
We do not have to look far to confirm this, for if we watch animals in nature they typically display a rhythm that includes periods of stillness.
Some animals remain totally still for hours or days on end.
An old teacher once told me that crocodiles are ‘master meditators’, for they can sit totally still for long periods of time, fully absorbed in sensation, attuned to their environment…just breathing.
For the deeper into ones ‘primality’ they go, the more silence they might find.
For those of you who are unfamiliar with the term ‘blind’, it refers to a ‘hidden’ location built by a human hunter, usually created by gathered vegetation, which allows them to ‘hide’ from their prey.
Often they are built around or in trees.
It is a hunting method deployed all over the world, and it requires extreme stillness for long periods of time, for it depends on ‘waiting’ for prey to present themselves.
This is a part of our ‘lineage’ as a species: a ‘full’ day could have meant sitting totally still… listening, watching, and waiting.
The pace of hunter gather’s is on average much slower than our pace today, for the breathed in and out with the flow of the living world.
Periods of activity were balanced with periods of stillness, in a world with no screens, career goals or perpetual motion machines.
Only the wild stillness…
Silence- The Essential Alchemical Ingredient
“All the wonders of life are already here. They’re calling you. If you can listen to them, you will be able to stop running. What you need, what we all need, is silence. Stop the noise in your mind in order for the wondrous sounds of life to be heard. Then you can begin to live your life authentically and deeply.” ― Thích Nhất Hạnh, Silence: The Power of Quiet in a World Full of Noise
We are all alchemist, for the language of life and death itself is alchemical.
Whenever we undergo change of any kind, alchemy is occurring.
At its core, alchemical reactions facilitate the change of one state into another state, through a series of phases.
Some of the most readily apparent examples of this are:
- The process of digesting food
- Water moving from solid, to liquid, to gas
- The creation of new land as magma cools to become solid earth
All this is alchemy.
This alchemy occurs ‘within’ as well:
- The series of realizations that allow to finally alter our ways
- The period leading up to a breakthrough that opens up new vistas of possibility
- The maturing of one’s consciousness that emerges from ongoing devotion to a set of practices
Those of us who cultivate alchemical practices are simply learning to surf more reliably with underlying aspects of nature.
Yet, the alchemy remains ‘incomplete’ without periods of emptiness, stillness and silence. Stillness is the space between the phases, the pivot point at the center of each phase, and the integrative agent that allows for the change to ‘settle’.
Whether someone works with alchemy consciously or not, silence (stillness) is an essential ingredient of the formula.
Organic Stillness & Rhythmatic Silence
There are entire traditions in the east built around ‘silence practices’.
I have spent years meditating in ‘silence’, (or for anyone who has engaged with such practices for any period of time knows, the reality is more akin to ‘silencing’).
While these practices can be immensely valuable, they are not the only way to integrate silence and stillness into one’s daily experience.
The method I want to share with you today, for integrating these states of consciousness is called Harvesting Pauses.
The Bones of The Method:
It is a method of fostering ‘organic stillness’ by settling more deeply into the spontaneously arising rhythm of ones day.
Periods of stillness/stilling follow periods of activity.
We might engage in a set of chores, write an article or finish a lively conversation, and then choose to pause.
Or perhaps we find a moment waiting for the gas to pump, to find stillness.
The state itself allows one’s awareness to move as it desires from external sensory information noticing whatever arises (sight, smell, sound, taste, sense), to internal bodily sensation noticing whatever arises (energetic movement, emotion), with one intent:
Pausing, Stilling, Stopping…Like sediment that has been kicked up by currents in a river, we become like a still lake , allowing the perpetual motion machine to cease.
This method is not based on ‘external stillness’ necessarily (though it does help), but internal stillness.
- Pauses can long (such as 20 minutes), or short (such as 20 seconds).
- These can happen as often as you like or need.
- Some days there are many small pauses, and others there is a single longer one.
The power of this method is that it slips into one’s daily way of being.
It allows us to begin to hear whispers again.
It is based in our organic animal nature, and innate physiology; for it calls back the spontaneously arising stops and starts, of the soft ancestral body…that needs periods of stillness.
At a deeper level, this is a method altering the fundamental rhythm of daily life, as a subversive act to the siren song of the perpetual motion machine.
A supplemental video can be found here at Ramon’s substack, where this post was taken from.