When were you last STILL?

When were you last STILL?

Today? Yesterday? Last week? Can you even remember when you last stopped, even for a few moments? A brief pause when you weren’t chasing a deadline, late for a meeting, heading off to meet someone for something, somewhere? If you are having trouble remembering, you are not alone. In our never-ending world of ‘busyness’, finding time to be STILL is a rare commodity.

The other day I was waiting for the green man to tell me I could cross the road safely and the lady next to me said ‘come on, I’m getting bored now’. It seems that modern life demands that we are always busy, that we keep moving and ‘doing’ all the time.

So, how about we just stop for a while and be STILL? Just, ‘be’.

Mindfulness enables us to do this, to be able to ‘be’ with that feeling of boredom. No, it isn’t a comfortable feeling, and that’s okay. But why aren’t we happy to be with that feeling? Yes, it’s connected to our fear or flight mechanism, but in today’s world it’s more than that. Is it perhaps guilt about not ‘doing’? Our mind will come up with a thousand excuses as to why we can’t just ‘be’, even just for a few minutes.

My job as a wellbeing consultant is to guide people through feeling uncomfortable. Anything we do that is out of our comfort zone can be about our brain’s resistance to change.

On 2^nd November I’ll be on stage with an audience of 1000 teaching them how to be STILL. Yes, 1000! I’m giving my first TedX talk, in Adelaide!

Last year I volunteered at TedX to energise the volunteers by taking them through a session of laughter yoga. It was something completely different, and I really enjoyed it. I decided then and there that giving a TedX talk had to be on my list of 50 new things in my 50^th year.

My submission was slightly audacious, to make the audience mediate and laugh in the space of 3 minutes, and I wasn’t entirely sure that it would be taken seriously. But I pressed ‘send’ anyway, chuckled a little and didn’t really think about it again until 3 weeks later when I got the call to say, ‘Ok, we’re intrigued, you’re in!’.

I’m in?! Yikes!

Most speakers get 8 – 15 mins, so I asked how many minutes I had been given and the answer was, ‘What you asked for, 3’! Um, okay, now I just needed to make it work!

To find out if I’m successful, from 3^rd November you can watch my talk on how to be STILL on YouTube.

Oh, and by the way, to follow my technique, you may have to go out of your comfort zone, but I promise you won’t be bored…!