Getting to Know Yourself through 'Silent Sit'

Every morning, from 09:00-09:45, we come together to sit. Part of the gathering is guided meditation and during the other part, we sit in silence. We call it a 'Silent Sit'. We sit in silence to discover silence. We sit to get to know ourselves.

As meditation, silence, and getting to know yourself might be very new to you, we would like to introduce this morning practice.

Why do we sit?

We are all looking for lasting happiness, ease, or peace of mind. Some call it love, some call it freedom, and some call it flow. Let’s summarize it as a sense of unconditional peace.

In our daily mode to find this peace, we are often focused on our thoughts, our emotions, and all the circumstances in our lives. We try to find peace in these experiences and we get identified with them. All our attention goes into the content of our lives.

But the nature of experiences is that they come and go. No experience is lasting, however good or bad it may be. So how can we find lasting peace and happiness in something that is temporary?

bold text In the Silent Sit, we will first invite you to break away from our habitual pattern of focusing on the content. We start noticing the ground, sensing the breath, and connecting to our body as a whole. This already gives a sense of ease and rest.

Then the invitation is to allow the flow of content to take place. Not suppressing our experience, not clinging to it, or trying to alter it. Fully allow the content to unfold without any reservations. Like Papaji said beautifully:

From there we invite you to feel into the context of the content. This is a shift of our attention to the openness or spaciousness where the content takes place. It is the vastness from which all experiences arise and in which all experiences dissolve.

A beautiful metaphor says it’s like the ocean and the waves. It might storm on the surface, but in the depth of the ocean there is a natural rest.

So experience may come and go. The content may change. But the context is unmoving, unchanging. Recognizing this context gives rise to a sense of peace, to a natural silence. It is the silence that gives rise to all the sounds.

There we invite you to relax and rest into the silence. It is a silence that does not choose, does not favour, does not cling. It simply is.

Maybe we realise that we are not separate from that boundless silence. Silence is our essence. This is our home, our true place of refuge.

Getting to know yourself

We recognize ourselves as the ocean. We might not choose the waves of life but we can choose to rest like the ocean. And when we look with the eyes of the ocean, can we still say that there are waves? Or do we recognize everything as ocean like?

The waves and the ocean are inseparable. And in the same way, the separation between content and context dissolves. Here we are home, we recognize ourselves. The peace we were always looking for happens to be right here. Right where we are, not separate from ourselves.

This is truly knowing yourself.

Please join our online sessions 7 days a week, from 09:00-09:45.

Sjoerd, Rolandjan, Inge and Royce