How to Cultivate Peace, Stillness, & Sanity

January 31, 2022

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{ By Chesline Pierre-Paul }

As the quote goes, whenever you articulate that you don’t have 20 minutes to be or to meditate, it means that you need a full hour of it as a required minimum to be and to claim sanity as your inalienable right, truth, and sanctity.

This speaks to the inverted logic and mechanics of stillness and restoration.

The more pressed for time I articulate myself to be, the more where my true necessity lies is with stillness.

The more I am poverty-stricken in mindset and in how I see only impoverishing states wherever my gaze lands (not enough time, money, energy, capacity, or resources), the more I am being called to challenge what I see as poverty and reframe it as defiant abundance.

Abundance cycles through different identities: it comes forth as opportunities, disruption, and collapse, as in the collapse of you, the collapse of your internal structures, beliefs, chosen and surrogate identities, anchors, and untruths.

How to cultivate peace, stillness, and sanity then, in a world so consumed with fast-pacedness and the shallow ends of self, power, and grace?

craziness: is the biggest point of impact for boundless joyousness, because it is unburdened by pretense, convention, or performativity, it seeks solely to know its own heart, to follow its own impulses, and to nurture its own volatility. What are the craziest nothings you claim when the “you” in attendance is the only “you” that is looking? What preposterously freeing nothings force laughter into your heart, into your world, into your consciousness? What “what if …?” have you silenced for fear of being too far gone into the expanse of your own wilderness? What “what if …?” makes your crazy the grounding force for incorruptible wholeness?

reality: dreams are the edge of the reality we inhabit. The more I pursue the pondered cultivation of my own dreams, the more extensible my gaze, my inner world, and my might become. I sit within the embodiment of my chosen truths, and I commit to experiencing a world that is unfractured, life-giving, and affirming. Reality is the feeling place of the thoughts and ideologies I harbor; it is a commitment made to favor beauty, presume abundance, and impose the unruptured stature of my selfhood as whole, self-expressed, self-proclaimed, and self-determined.

relativity: time denied or afforded is relative. And rather than forcing myself to pace through life on a clock, on assignment, but not in presence, or in depth, I qualify what ought not to be quantified: time. That is to say, a 20 minutes of unbroken stillness that affords me peace, sanity, and restoration for days and hours on end, if quantifiably a reduced scope of time, yet qualitatively it is the perfect bracket of time and space for me to de-escalate the noise that sits within me so that I may come to hold myself in repose and quiet. For instance, most mornings, I sit with a quote from one of my Knock Knock journals and ponder. From there, I self-generate new thoughts, new insights into myself, and expand the story I tell about who and what I am through these prompts, the latter of which helps me engage back with my truest nature in a world where only I am entitled to my own truth and story.

Cultivating peace, stillness, and sanity is how you give depth and grounding to your world. It is how you signal to yourself that you are the first and – in the bigger scheme of things – the only one truly entitled to your availability and presence. It is how you cease to be functional so that you may be reclaimed by affirmation, groundedness, and the wilderness within.
When you claim these truths, your time and presence are more extensible, because more is tasted and accomplished within the same fragment of time and within the same act of presence, because you chose stillness as the opener of all your inner worlds and as the starting place of presence as both power and affirmation. For more.