Reflections
Finding Stillness in a Noisy World: My Shiva Practice
Most days start with noise before I've even opened my eyes. A notification, a half-formed thought about something left unfinished the night before, the low hum of everything waiting to be handled. The stillness I've found through Shiva didn't arrive by removing that noise. It arrived by learning to sit inside it differently.
Stillness was never about silence
For a long time, I assumed stillness meant the absence of noise, a quiet room, an empty inbox, a mind with nothing pulling at it. Under that definition, stillness was always just out of reach, one more task away, always postponed until conditions were perfect.
Sitting with Shiva's stillness, the kind depicted in every image of him meditating on Kailash, unmoved regardless of what surrounds him, reframed this completely. His stillness isn't the absence of a chaotic world. He sits at the literal edge of the world, surrounded by cremation grounds, wild animals, the fiercest elements of existence, and remains still anyway. The stillness isn't about the environment. It's about what happens internally regardless of the environment.
What this looks like at 3:30 in the morning
My own practice happens before dawn, not because that hour is inherently quieter (though it helps), but because it's the one part of the day I've protected entirely from demands. No messages arriving yet. No one needing anything from me yet. Just the mantra, repeated, and whatever mental noise happens to be present that particular morning.
Some mornings that noise is loud: a deadline weighing on me, a conversation I'm still turning over, a worry that hasn't resolved. The stillness I'm after was never about waiting for that noise to stop before I can begin. It's about beginning anyway, letting the mantra hold steady while the noise does whatever it's going to do.
The discipline of returning, not achieving
I used to treat stillness as a destination, something I'd eventually arrive at and stay in permanently once I'd practiced enough. That's not how it's worked out. Some mornings the stillness comes easily within minutes. Other mornings it never fully arrives, and I finish the practice still carrying some of the noise I started with.
What's changed isn't my ability to eliminate that noise. It's my relationship to not eliminating it. I no longer treat a noisy morning as a failed practice. The practice was never about winning against the noise, it was about showing up to sit with it regardless, the same way Shiva sits regardless of what surrounds him on Kailash.
Why this matters beyond the cushion
The real test of this practice was never the mornings themselves. It's what happens afterward, whether that returned stillness holds even slightly once the day's actual demands begin. Some days it barely holds past breakfast. Other days, I notice myself reaching for it hours later, in a stressful moment, almost without deciding to.
That's the only measure I've found that actually matters: not whether the world gets quieter, it won't, but whether I'm slightly less at the mercy of its noise than I was before I started.
Curious what a daily mantra practice has taught me over time? Read: What Chanting Om Namah Shivaya Daily Has Taught Me.