G’day, my name’s Chris Walker and I want to talk to you today about Stillness, real life stillness.  Ahh, so easy in an ashram.  You go to one of these places, a health resort or something or a healing centre, it’s real easy to be calm and still in one of those places because, well you’re away from the real world and everybody’s looking after your troubles for you.  

But, I’m talking about real life stillness, I’m talking about living in the world, feeling still, inside yourself, even when you’re out partying or going to work or doing your thing, still having a sense of good stillness inside of you and so, that’s what this series of posts is going to be about.  And there’s going to be a bunch of topics we’re going to cover.  Let’s look at a few of them now so you get an idea of what’s going to happen in the series of posts on Stillness.

The first topic is going to be about love because I think good love inside a person makes them feel really calm.  You feel good love inside of you towards people and towards animals and nature and pets and things, you never feel really quite relaxed because nobody can take that away from you, nobody can fight you, nobody can really disturb you because if you keep love important in your life, you’re going to hold that really centre, so we’re going to talk in the book about how to keep good love happening in your life.

The next topic is going to be having a big picture mentality.  You know, there’s a lot of turbulence and people can get you really bent out of shape really easy, so the idea is to see the world in a bigger way than just what the newspapers or the press or some trend is going on.  I think we need to look at it more like if we were looking from the moon, looking back at the Earth.  What does it look like?  Big picture mentality means you don’t get bent out of shape so easy.  And you get kind of like this space where you can be your self and care about the world but you’re not disturbed, your centre is health strong.

The next topic we’ll talk about is being flexible.  Now, people mess with your head all the time and if you don’t become flexible, they’re going to really mess with your whole being and your whole life.  So, flexibility is what we’re going to talk about, how to deal with people and situations you have with other people, how they come in and go out of your life and how you deal with emotional disturbances that go on.  And I think this is really important because how can you have stillness if you’re always flipping out and people are flipping you out at work and at home or wherever that is.  We’re going to talk a lot about flexibility.

The next topic we’ll talk about is confidence because I think a lot of disturbance comes to us because we don’t know where we’re going and we don’t know what the future holds.  And there’s two sorts of confidence.  One is confidence in our self, and that’s sort of survival.  And the other confidence is confidence in the world that we live in. Confidence that we’re going to do what we want in the future.  So you have to ask yourself, when we’re talking about confidence, you have to ask, what are you going to do with the rest of your life?  What are you going to do with your future, and is the world you’re living in and the world that you want to create, pretty much on target for yourself?  We’re not talking about rushing towards the future, we’re not talking about panicking about this but having confidence that the dreams you have and the future that you want will really come together in the future.

The next topic we’ll talk about is control, and that means having a sense of self awareness that you are in control of your life.  If you’re not in control of your life, that’s a pretty frightening experience and it’s going to make you pretty tense and stressed.

Control of your life comes in three ways.  It comes in the place where you live and what you do.  It comes in the form of money.  Do you have enough money to control where you’re going and what you’re doing and where you’re living?  And the other one is your relationship.  So, we’re going to talk on three levels about control of your life.

The next topic we’re going to talk about is connections, and for me this is pretty cool because I think friends and family are great connections but all of those things can come and go so if we use those things as the connections, as the foundation of our life, we’re almost always going to feel a little bit out of sorts, or a little bit not confident.  

So, we’re going to talk in this book about creating really strong connections to something outside of our self and something outside of human people.  A sense of God or a sense of earth, or a sense of spirit that comes out of the earth and therefore, something that doesn’t change.  

I’m not talking about a God that judges us or a religion that tells us what to do, I’m talking about something that’s really fact, like the Universal Law or nature, an understanding of what you believe about life and death because one of the things that disturbs people’s stillness throughout their lives is the lack of understanding about death and they’re always worried about it or trying to avoid it or trying to avoid witnessing it.  And death is really part of life.  You know, you can’t have a life without ending up with a death, it’s the cycle of nature, and this is going to be an important facet of this book.

So, if you’re ready, I am.  If you’re ready, let’s get started now.