Stillness 9-27: My mother, whose birthday is today, loathed ideology and ideologists. She grew up in Spain during the Civil War and then her family moved to Italy during World War II and she witnessed first-hand the atrocities and terror that ideology could inflict. She used to say that ideologists swung their ideologies like truncheons and woe betide you if you got in the way. Stay away from them! She was a humanist, a lover of life, people, and adventure.
One of the things I learned from her was how to come up against prejudice and fear with heart-centered stillness. She herself was like a whirlwind, but in her core was the still eye of the hurricane: her authentic self. Because of her traumatic childhood, she had learned ways to stop her automated fearful (fight-or-flight) brain response and instead to experience life from her heart. Listen to your heart, she would tell me. What does your heart say?
When we’re inundated with seemingly dire predictions and bad news, our brains become overtaxed with exhausting stress hormones. What can we do? There’s only one thing, really, and that’s to experience life from the stillness of our heart. To take a deep breath and feel only complete consciousness of the present. This moment, this breath. This is why being in nature is so healing for us—beautiful nature asks nothing more from us than to be who we are and become our fullest potential, no one else’s. We don’t have to become anyone else’s idea of who we should be. We don’t have to go, do, react, shout, or swing our truncheons. We only have to be ourselves.
Try responding to a news bulletin from your heart. What does your heart say? What does your heart know? What does your heart want you to do? And then listen. Maybe you need to talk to someone. Or maybe you just need to go for a walk. Your response is not about the news bulletin, it’s about you.
When your friend moans and groans and gnashes their teeth in misery, try responding from your heart, instead of assuming or advising or solving or defending. Maybe listening is all that’s being asked of you. Or maybe it’s encouragement, or caution, or quiet support. Whatever is needed, listen to the person’s voice, its timber and inflection, more than the words. Listen from your heart rather than your overworked brain that is typically on high-alert and in its ready-to-respond-with-facts-and-figures-and-good-advice mode.
When we think with our heart, and act from our heart, we are calm and purposeful. We help others to feel calm and purposeful too. We feel a love for humanity and all creatures in it. This love ripples through us, connecting us with the great love that is our essence.
P.S. My mother’s book, Around the World by Mistake, is a beautiful account of our adventures living on a freighter when I was seven years old.