This is a free preview of the beginning of the book A Year of Stillness: A Journey Into Inner Peace and Awakening.

1st of January

The first day of a new year dawns in soothing darkness. A sense of peace is present. A fascinating and sacred silence embraces the moment. The stillness within is beautiful, and the peace remains, even when noisy children are playing and running around. They occasionally argue and need their parents’ attention, but even that does not disturb the peace experienced today. Only a subtle pull towards thinking happens at times, but the thoughts fade away quickly, just like the breath evaporates into the surrounding cold air.

The darkness of the winter is impenetrable. The sun barely rises at all during the day. However, there is something very serene in the dark embrace of mother nature. The absence of natural light somehow creates space for the absence of thoughts, in the same way as the absence of noise allows silence to emerge.

Fresh snow covers the ground. Seawater seeps through the layer of thin ice just a few meters away from the waterfront. Yesterday it was all just immovable ice, and most likely it will be so again tomorrow when the air grows colder. The change in nature happens with a curious and inexorable certainty. Occasionally, the mind tries to contemplate that change, but thinking about nature’s phenomena does not seem to add any real value to the pure experiences of those phenomena. Thinking always includes added value that is created apparently out of thin air. A subtle and untouchable peace lies in the silence of the mind, but the compulsion to think creates a veil in front of that peace. All value that is created through thinking can be justified only through more thinking. Is there any real value in thoughts that only symbolize other thoughts? Such is the problem of the human mind.

What would be a more promising start for a new year than to remain the first day in an undefinable state of inner stillness? In that stillness, a new and deeper dimension of life is revealed.

2nd of January

Driving to work for the first time this year. Short glimpses of the peace experienced yesterday appear in the mind, but they are only memories. They are not the experience. Thoughts try to reach for the peace, but only the reaching happens.

The mind tries to find value in the present moment by forcing the peace to come back. It has created a shining trophy of the inner stillness described by the memories of yesterday. The mind cannot understand that inner peace never comes by applying force. The peace within any moment is revealed only in the natural flow of the world—not in the efforts of trying to control that flow.

The traffic of the morning hours is intense. The headlights of numerous cars are flowing like an endless river of spherical lights in the surrounding darkness. Suddenly, amid the heavy traffic, it unfolds again—the stillness. A curious feeling always arises when the stillness reveals itself because it includes a total cessation of thoughts. It always occurs without warning, without a personal investment of making it happen. After a while of just dwelling in inner stillness, the mind draws memories of the younger daughter exclaiming after a recent birthday party: “It is so silent here. So silent. Children are very noisy.” She herself is most of the time very noisy, and maybe that is why she notices the silences.

After repeating the memory for a while, the mind falls silent again. Everything that remains is the road, the car, the flow of headlights, and the dance of the traffic in general. There are no problems in the present moment, nothing to achieve, nowhere else to be, and nothing to resist or avoid. A distant sound of a car horn colors the continuous hum of the traffic. After that, everything is rendered to soothing background noise again.

A silent peacefulness lingers below the surface of the traffic. The mind stays quiet for a long period of time, before arriving to work. Soon after, a stream of compulsive thinking and conditioned behavioral patterns wash away the peaceful stillness.

3rd of January

Trembling hands and mild sweating while presenting the results of a project to a client. It is strange because there seems to be no stress involved in the situation. The mind feels confident, and the client is most certainly satisfied. Nevertheless, the mind does not like the idea of stress in the situation, and maybe that is why the symptoms of stress occur. The body acts in the most simple ways when attention is given to its functions.

While speaking and listening in turn, the attention is getting pulled elsewhere. Fortunately, the client and colleagues do not seem to notice the light distraction. An illusion of participation is created in an apparently convincing way. The snowflakes slowly fall on the people walking in the street, and they pull the awareness like a magnet. Everyone seems to be in a hurry, for whatever reasons they harbor within. Many of them walk with blind eyes, sunken into the deep waters of their thoughts. Only a few seem to really notice the beautiful snowfall, even though every one of them is walking through and in it. What would be more important at that particular moment? Thoughts? Personal problems? A sense of hurry? Some more important place to be? Memories of yesterday? Mental images of tomorrow?

Attention is empowerment in its purest form. It flows like a vast river through the kingdoms of acceptance and resistance. Ultimately, acceptance is the only kingdom there is. Everything is always rendered to acceptance, but usually, it happens through resistance, through mostly redundant thinking. The mind that blinds the people from seeing the subtle beauty of the snowfall is a sophisticated mechanism of resistance.

The snow keeps on falling. The dialogue about the project results continues.

4th of January

Alone. The family is elsewhere for the night. The house is very silent. The mind is restless because it is not used to such silence in an environment, which usually includes sounds of children running around and playing. A recently released samurai movie colors the evening with lots of swords, blood, and gore. The mind has a fascinating habit of longing for feelings of fear and even revulsion. The movie indeed creates such feelings, but it must be seen nevertheless. It has a strange gravity in it, and there is no use in resisting that gravity.

The mind races after watching the movie. The scenes of blood and severed limbs flow in the stream of thoughts. Parts of the movie are replayed in mental images many times during the rest of the evening. Whenever strong emotions are present, the mind tends to go into repeat mode. Repetition is the tool it uses to imprint memories in the unexamined corners of the human identity.

The silence that filled the house all evening starts to feel more alive when lying in bed. The inner stillness unfolds through that silence. It happens suddenly, without any warning, as it always does. Nothing else arises in the awareness, but the warm bed, the gloomy lights of the room, the ceiling, the walls, the sound of breathing, subtle tingling in the fingers and toes, and the soft feeling of the bed under the body. No thoughts arise. The inner stillness prevails. A car drives by and the mind fills the awareness just for a fraction of a second to label the sound as a car, and then it falls silent again. The stillness is very present. Everything is immovable and yet continuously changing.

5th of January

No light exists that could cast a shadow. Light is all there is. It penetrates every single thing in consciousness, adopting myriad forms and an infinity of experiences. Whatever the actual nature of light is, it is most likely something that cannot be conveyed using words, images, or thoughts. Even to call it light is profoundly misleading.

A deep sacredness and austerity are felt in the way everything unfolds. Snow falls down slowly and serenely. The dark sky spreads out to open its endless embrace over the cold ground. The temperature is just below zero degrees. The gentle coldness is perceived in the snowflakes as well. Their falling seems effortless, and the white blanket of new snow on the ground looks very soft and light.

Streetlights penetrate the snowfall to create a sharp contrast with the surrounding darkness of winter. Darkness and light are truths that conflict with each other, and can yet live with each other; shadows that are seen as shadows are essentially full of light. The strange dichotomy of light and darkness swirls in the mind, but the mind cannot grasp it. Despite the mind’s best efforts, only the grasping occurs, and nothing else.

The mind falls silent again. Only the faint sound of the footsteps on the snowy ground remains. Even moving through the snowfall, everything feels very still and peaceful.

6th of January

The level of energy in children is sometimes incomprehensible. The new day dawns very early, and the daughters are playing and singing in their parents’ bedroom. Where do they derive their energy from, especially at such early hours?

Children are apparently not burdened by a sense of identity—that would limit their energy. The inner resistance in children is mostly minimal. Whatever mishaps they experience, they tend to shrug it off quite fast. It is a skill not many adults are capable of. Instead of moving forward, the adults usually dwell in the memories or expectations of their problematic life situations.

Emotions are empowered most efficiently when given undivided attention. This does not mean intellectually contemplating the emotions, but directly feeling them just as they are, without a single thought running through the mind. Allowing the emotions to be just as they are is witnessing creation in its purest form. Through this witnessing, changes happen; sorrow and anger might turn into joy in a blink of an eye. In the natural fluctuation of emotions, no grasping thoughts arise that would make one dwell in the achieved state of mind or emotions.

The joyous play of children usually expresses the fluctuation of emotions in perfect harmony with the surrounding world. The hurt they might occasionally feel is an expression of that same fluctuation. The only thing that breaks the perfect harmony of a child’s temper tantrum is an adult who does not allow the tantrum to take place. Reason and intellect seldom have any constructive effect when dealing with strong emotions. Actually, rational thinking seems to only strengthen emotions that are already strong to begin with.

7th of January

The sun lights up the open sky and sheds golden rays on the white snowy landscape. Only a few clouds are seen in the distance. Their edges are colored in the most magnificent hues which only the winter sun can bring into existence. The mind is open like the sky above, and every once in a while, only a thought or two float by. Inner peace and stillness prevail. Everything is beautiful in an effortless way, and thinking does not add anything to the situation. Any thought seems to only diminish the situation.

The children are playing in the snow. They must be advised a few times because of their rough behavior toward each other. Parents are usually blind in the way they raise their children. They tend to repeat the past and the way they have been raised themselves. Parents bestow their offspring all the worries, expectations, regrets, joys, resentments, gratitudes, pleasures, and sufferings as they harbor within themselves. They expect the children to become like themselves, but that easily inflicts more or less unnecessary suffering on the children because no human being and no child is what we think they are.

What drives another human being cannot be known entirely, no matter how much their behavior is scrutinized. Whatever one recognizes as another’s thoughts is only a projection in one’s own mind—a mental image of the other person. Whatever words come out of their mouths, or whatever actions they commit, are only indistinct clouds in the open sky. Judging someone for their words or actions is an act of expressing one’s own ignorance.

Raising children to become like their parents is an unconscious effort in trying to raise mental images of the parents themselves. Even though there might be partial successes, it is thoroughly impossible, given the endless unexamined layers of the human mind. Therefore, any advice given to children should first go through an open awareness of the parent’s own thoughts and expectations. Most pieces of advice are not necessary at all because children will inevitably grow up without the constant interfering of adults and their deeply rooted mental positions.

8th of January

The mind is restless today, and it drifts into deep realms of compulsive thinking. Not a moment of inner stillness arises. Only a memory of it remains, and a memory of something apparently better than this moment always creates a grain of suffering inside.

Get A Year of Stillness Now

The Dusk Hour

The Sands of Time

Homeward Bound

Echoes From the Distant Horizons

Scattering Lights

See all posts from Jussi Niittyviita