Learning to sit still with yourself

Have you ever wondered how does it feel to do nothing? Truly nothing.

No alarms to wake you up, no need to rush to work and no need to worry about deadline, no problems to solve, no thoughts to chase, no notifications tugging at your attention. What happens when the mind has nothing left to hold on to? What arises then? These questions had lived in me for a long time, like distant echoes waiting for a place to land.

I remember my first encounter when I touched that meditative state when I attended meditation of Shri Shri Ravi Shankar’s Art of Living almost 18 years ago. At the time it didn’t seem significant. People were sitting quietly in a big hall covered with white, following the teachers instructions, doing breath work and concentrating in your body parts one by one, so that it was supposed to calm the mind. In the midst of meditation my mind reached different state that my mind and thoughts has stopped. I felt the joy and calmness that words even cannot explain. After then I resumed my normal busy life and gradually the ordinary life has absorbed my attention again. I lost the question and spiraled in my everyday life. But years have passed and somehow deep down the craving to feel that feeling has started rising again and again deep in my mind as if something calling me. 

After almost two decades, I had the chance to bring courage to attend a 10-day Vipassana course at Dhamma Bhumi in the Blue Mountains of Australia. I would say this was the most courageous thing I did in my life and one of the life changing experiences.

About one hundred and twenty people gathered there, each arriving with their own reason to come. But from the first day the silence made it feel as though I was entirely alone. For ten days meditators should maintain complete silence, without speaking to anyone, or communicating with outside world. No phone, no books, and even writing is not permitted.

The first bell rang before sunrise each morning, and from that moment until the last light of day, everything was meditation. Breakfast, lunch, and a small tea break were the only interruptions in a long stretch of stillness.

A Heavenly Place – Dhamma Bhummi

At the entrance, a small garden received us—nothing elaborate, just a patch of green leading to a terrace shaded by a tall rhododendron tree. Its pink-and-white blossoms trembled in the cold wind, soft and delicate, as if they belonged to a world more fragile than this one.

From the terrace, everything opened. Layers of deep blue hills, eucalyptus forests exhaling thin clouds of mist, and above them, a sky so wide it felt almost indifferent to our presence. The view was extravagant in its simplicity—ancient, quiet, untouched by hurry.

Birdsong drifted in from every direction. Some sounds I had never heard before. One call echoed with a strange, almost otherworldly tone. Another chirped like a gentle morning alarm.

A kangaroo hopped across the road with the casual ease of someone taking a familiar path home. Nothing asked for attention, yet everything drew me in. For a moment, I felt as though I had stepped out of my life and into another world—one that had always been here, waiting.

The air was colder than Sydney: sharp, clean, alive.

Weather changed like thoughts—sunlight in one breath, a low rumble of thunder in the next. Sometimes rain swept across the hills. Sometimes the cold crept into my bones, and I found myself wishing for a knitted hat. Every inhale carried the scent of forest, wet earth, and eucalyptus.

And for the first time in a long while, I noticed my breathing. The coolness entering. The freshness settling in the chest. A quiet reminder that even without doing anything, life continues on its own.

From my room, the Blue Mountains spread out like a painting, too perfect to be real. Looking at that view, I realised that beauty is never missing. It is only our pace that makes it invisible.

Silence is not silent

At first the absence of distraction seemed really peaceful that I thought finally it’s time to relax. But who knew when the world outside quiets, the world inside becomes loud. Thoughts that I had outrun for years arrived one by one, like visitors who had been waiting patiently outside the door. Without my usual distractions, each of them tried to walk right in all at the same time.

At first, I tried to not to think and frustrated that the thoughts coming in and going out without even my permission. It felt like the thought are controlling me instead I should. It felt like we don’t have any control over ourselves even our minds. I tried to maintain the posture of a “good meditator. Straight spine. Still body. Perfect breath. But the mind didn’t care about any of that. It didn’t care about discipline or effort or intention. It simply moved in its own way, its own rhythm, untouched by what I wanted it to be.

Memories drifted in—some soft, some sharp.

A thought about the past arrived without context. An old regret stood quietly in the corner. A future worry wandered through, uninvited. Everything moved through me like weather patterns crossing the landscape.

I realised then, the mind has its own climate. Sometimes it was bright and warm. Sometimes a fog rolled in, thick and dull. Sometimes a storm gathered from nowhere and broke open in the chest. But beneath all of it, a quiet truth lingered –

nothing stayed.

As the days passed, I noticed the body reacting to the mind’s storms. A tightness around the heart. A pulsing in the stomach. A sudden ache in the back that had no physical cause. Every emotion left a trace, a fingerprint somewhere in the body, as if reminding me that thoughts don’t just visit — they settle.

The teachings said: observe without reacting.

But observation was not a passive thing.

It was to face what you have avoided and to feel without collapsing into the feeling.

To observe is to stay, even when every part of you wants to run.

By each day passing, I understood why the silence felt difficult. It wasn’t the silence itself. It was everything the silence revealed.

Still, when the bell rang for each session, something in me softened. I returned to the cushion, not because it was easy, but because something in me wanted to see what lay beneath the noise.

One afternoon, during a break, I stood outside in the cold. The hills breathed mist. The trees shifted with the wind. Birds called to each other across the open sky.

Nothing demanded anything from me. Nothing asked me to be more, or better, or different.

In that moment, I realised how rarely I allowed myself to simply exist. To be here without adjusting anything. To be here without fixing myself. To be here without deciding who I should be next.

Just standing on the earth, feeling the cool air move in and out of my chest, something loosened. A small opening appeared—like a window cracked just enough for fresh air to enter.

Maybe doing nothing wasn’t about effort at all.

Maybe it was about permission.

Permission to stop controlling. Permission to feel without resisting. Permission to allow the mind to speak in its own language. Permission to experience life moment by moment without questions or conclusions.

The hills didn’t need conclusions.

The trees didn’t.

The sky certainly didn’t.

So why did I?

As the day ended and the sky turned a soft shade of blue, I felt the faintest shift inside me—not enlightenment, not clarity, not peace. Something smaller. Something more honest.

A willingness.

A willingness to meet whatever came next.

And in that willingness, a new kind of freedom began to appear—not loud, not dramatic, but quiet, subtle, and unmistakably real.

/While attending meditation, I had the impulse to capture the experience in words. What is written here is entirely drawn from my own journey during the meditation —unique, imperfect, and deeply personal — and I know that each person’s meditation experience will be different./