#99- Motionless yet active

Since the beginning of the term, the meditations have centred around exploring the main supports of  meditation. As a reminder, for Danis Bois, a support is this something on which we apply our attention, our presence, our awareness and in a more dynamic perspective, these supports provide the grounding on which perceptual, cognitive, relational and behavioural potentialities can be developed.

Having, in the preceeding weeks, explored silence, the present moment in all its aspects, it is not time to explore two fundamental supports of Full-Presence Meditation: motionlessness and what we call an active motionlessness, meaning the inner movement. 

In this meditation, Danis Bois explores through the inner movement what the poet T.S. Elliot calls ‘the dance’, alluding to the co-existence of stillness and movement – a lively stillness.  

Having reaching the state of motionlessness in the meditation, it is then seen as the revealer of the inner movement inside the body. 

Extracts :

I invite you to imagine that you are a statue, draped in silence, and as all statues, you feel unmovable, unshakable by external events.

When you feel the support of your back on the chair or another area of support, it is the sign that you are being touched by yourself, that you are feeling what you are feeling. 

But there is another sign that enables you to be touched by yourself, to feel touched by yourself and that is presence, the presence of the movement that glides within your matter. 

And so, in your journey of self-discovery, you are now at the heart of a moment of experience that is unique, royal, that enables you to grasp this motion, slow, majestic. A stillness that is alive, as described by T. S. Eliot, the poet. 

And this motionlessness that is active is full of unforeseen events. This unexpected becomes the nourishment of your life. 

And so in this place in motion, there is everything that we feel, everything that we think, everything that we are, but there is also this presence of this movement that is, at the same time, in motion and motionless 

And gives us the feeling of being, the feeling of existing in a different way.

It is a motionlessness in motion, moving and touching and this experience escapes, most often, human awareness. 

What would life be without the future? What would life be without subjectivity? What would life be without this movement? It is probably what Rodin’s thinker is thinking about.

The poet T.S. Eliot calls this motionlessness, this moving stillness, this lively stillness, he calls it a dance. A dance that expresses timelessness and the ephemeral at the same time.

And so this experience of life within us is obvious for those who are awakening to this presence, as it is indeed a presence, that makes visible the invisible, that makes present an absence and it is in this way, to continue with our metaphor, that the statue at the bottom of the garden was awakened to life.

Danis Bois