Weekly Inspiration: The Art of Stillness

I enjoy - when I can find the time - inspirational videos or essays, and whenever I post one here on my blog, I get plenty of positive feedback. So, I thought I'd start a weekly feature, Weekly Inspiration, which will not only allow me to share these inspirational pieces with you, but will also ensure that I take a bit of time to myself each week to find and enjoy something inspirational.

I often find my best inspiration among the large library of TED talks, and this week is no exception. I listened to a talk by Pico Iyer, a travel writer, on The Art of Stillness and knew immediately that I wanted to share it with my blog readers.

Now, you may think this sounds a bit silly. Who knows more about stillness than those of us with ME/CFS, forced to rest every day and spend much (or all) of our time lying down, in bed or at home. But he is talking about mental stillness, not necessarily physical stillness.

I don't know about you, but my life has changed dramatically over the last 5-10 years. I find I am now constantly on my laptop, on the internet, checking e-mail, blogs, Twitter, interacting with my Facebook groups, etc. While the online interaction has been helpful to me in some ways, it has also definitely been a detriment to mental stillness. That's part of what Iyer talks about here - the need to take a break, to let your mind rest. Since rest is so critical to ME/CFS, we need to make sure we are taking time for real rest in this way.

Enough from me - check out this wonderful, inspiring talk:



Now, turn off that computer and discover for yourself the art of stillness.