Life Practices – Sitting Quietly

Sitting Quietly is a most useful psychological skill – and practice – to develop and engage in living a rich, meaningful, and rewarding life. The experience of sitting quietly is usually some form of introspection and manifest in myriad ways including mindful contemplation, prayer, reflection, taking time out, meditation, respite, chilling, collecting, noticing, centering…

Whatever one may choose to call sitting quietly (SQ) – for it can be any one or a combination of these – it is the practice of taking a little time out of your day or your weekly grind and giving yourself the opportunity to just be…and thus to connect, and sometimes this means re-connect, to the fundamental, genuine, essential you. It’s a practice that allows one to process pain, grief and hurt; to determine and reflect on what is important; to discover something never realized before; and to feed or tap into when necessary the inner strength and basic goodness of our being!

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So, consider:

1. SQ is SELF-CARE…and helps to promote Balance in your life.

• • SQ can be to your mental well-being what exercise is to your physical well-being.
  • It can relaxthe mind, and serve as a respite (rest) from “monkey-mind” and the incessant demand to do more, be more, impress more, acquire more.  It also serves as an antidote to the stressful, toxic impact of living in a 24/7 media-saturated environment.
  • And yet it can also hone and sharpen the mind; and serve as a preventative to living your life too much on automatic pilot.

2. SQ is THERAPEUTIC…and helps to develop Psychological Flexibility.

• • SQ facilitates the advantageous process of improving one’s capacity to be open, curious, and flexible…in learning about life, understanding the human condition, and engaging in the exploration of the mystery.
  • It facilitates defusion, which means you can disengage from “the struggle” of whatever life has brought on, and thus enable you to look at your thoughts rather than being caught up in
  • It helps in processing grief and loss…and serves to reconcile life’s pain and hurt.

3. SQ IMPROVES THINKING…and helps to develop Resiliency.

• • It’s a way to trainyour mind…to better focus, to observe, and to awaken.
  • It enables introspection…to reflect, process events and behaviors, and to adapt.
  • It “sharpens the saw” (Covey’s 7th Habit) of one’s cognitive abilities, feeds motivation, and can serve to re-boot one’s outlook to start clean and fresh in taking life on.

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If you have not already been taught, or discovered, the powerful skills of sitting quietly, it’s something you might consider learning how to do, given the rather significant benefits they provide. SQ, like exercise, can be easy to learn…and, like exercise, delivers a reward commensurate with the effort invested. There are many ways to engage such a practice and, like exercise, part of the challenge can be, at least at first, finding the ways and approaches that work best for you.

Finally, a reminder – or maybe an epiphany(!). There are four daily practices that have the most profound effect on your own overall well-being: 1) diet, 2) sleep, 3) exercise, and…4) sitting quietly. With each of these, there are no proxies: You’re the one who calls the shots…