Dear Reader,

There is a tendency in meditation - or in any stillness practice - to sit in worries for 20 minutes instead of sitting in stillness for 20 minutes.

This tendency originates in a specific behaviour:
sitting with your own answers to your own questions.

Stuck in a loop.
Question, answer, outcome.
Question, answer, outcome.
Question, answer, outcome.

The skill that can be awakened and trained is different.

To sit with the question.

Allow it to remain. Let associations emerge spontaneously - without fixating on any of them. Without investing in a specific solution.
You do invest yourself, by spending thought energy, on the question side.

Can you sit, like an empty cup, with a question without manufacturing answers?

You may know this from experience.
Novel solutions tend to appear after. Just not instantly.

Lack of patience is often why we want to control the solution, and self-evidently start to loop.

You plant the seed question: and then, after a night of sleep, in a dream, while walking, in a long shower, looking out of a train window - something new arrives.

One practical way to practice this: go to sleep with the question.

Actively (yes, bring thought intensity to it) bring to your awareness your question in the minutes before sleep.
Let it refine itself in the dark in the minutes before sleep.

"Zero
Is where the real fun starts.

There's too much counting
everywhere else."​
​- Hafiz

This week's voice note explores what happens when you stop trying to fix a symptom and start listening to what it is pointing toward.

→ Tension in the Jaw — 13 min [Spotify link]

Coming up:
I'll be leading a movement practice at
the Martial Arts Expo in MAS Museum, Antwerp.

April 18 — about 2 hours.

If you're in Antwerp, feel welcome to practice with us.

→ Register here [session includes expo visit!]

Wishing you still yourself in the question,

Olivier

​

Sint-Janstraat , Borgerhout , Antwerp 2140
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Sint-Janstraat , Borgerhout , Antwerp 2140
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