Learning to Be Still and Returning to Yourself

Learning the value of being still in a world that never stops
15 minute read

There was a time in my life when everything appeared under control. From the outside, I looked composed, capable, smiling, moving through my days with rehearsed flow. But inside my home, and inside myself, it was a different story. I was a ‘married-single’ raising three children, holding together a life that kept slipping through my hands, constantly cleaning up strife while pretending I wasn’t breaking.

My days were spent juggling expectations; my nights, wondering how I had let life become this way. The world saw a resemblance of order; I felt only disappointment and failure. I told myself this was just what motherhood looked like: exhaustion, sacrifice, and holding everyone else together while quietly coming undone. I didn’t recognise that what I called strength was often survival.

The pace I kept was unsustainable, but slowing down felt dangerous. If I stopped, I would have to face the reality of what life was really like. Everything I had built might collapse, and with it, the illusion that I was fine.

During my first marriage, silence unnerved me. It made the space between us impossible to ignore. So I filled it with busyness, with striving, with constant doing. The busier I became, the less I had to feel. I volunteered, overworked, and overcommitted, convinced that productivity could protect me from pain. I pretended it was okay, with each infidelity forgiven, each disappointment buried deep. I did my best to make my marriage look solid: a family, a home, a calendar full of obligations. Yet our intimacy had been replaced with performance. I didn’t know how to be still with myself, let alone with someone else.

It would take years for me to understand that my constant striving wasn’t proof of ambition; it was avoidance. I was chasing “more” because I didn’t know how to be present with what already was. I thought peace lived somewhere in the future. I believed it would come in the next milestone, the next achievement, the next version of me that might finally feel worthy.

Stillness, at that time, felt like surrender. And surrender, to me then, meant failure. Looking back, I can see what was happening: my mind had become addicted to distraction. I was living in what psychologists Matthew Killingsworth and Daniel Gilbert describe as the default mode network — the mental pattern of wandering away from the present moment, often linked to lower happiness. My body was present, but my attention lived elsewhere.

The cost of that disconnection was profound. It wasn’t only the distance between those I loved and me; it was the distance within myself and between the woman I was and the woman I longed to be.

The Modern Epidemic of Distraction

We only need to look around for a moment to witness distraction; it is in the air we breathe. Our devices vibrate with demands; our calendars overflow; our thoughts multitask even when our bodies cannot. The result is a culture that mistakes motion for meaning.

We chase more progress, more possessions, more proof that we are enough and yet the chase itself keeps us from feeling what being enough truly is.

The psychologist and philosopher William James once said, “Each of us literally chooses, by his ways of attending to things, what sort of a universe he shall appear to himself inhabit.” Our attention is not passive. It constructs our reality.

When our focus is fractured, our inner world fragments with it. We live in pieces, half in memory, half in anticipation, rarely, if ever, at home in the moment we are actually living.

I know this because that is how I lived for years.

The Turning Point

When my first marriage ended, I was left with a silence I had never learned to face. And strangely, within that silence, I felt the first flicker of peace, a moment that changed how I saw myself and my journey.

The constant strife subsided and what remained was a question I had avoided for years: How do I return to myself?

I remember sitting on the floor among boxes, every sound amplified, the hum of the fridge, the soft tick of the clock, and realising that my mind had no idea how to be where my body was. That was the beginning of what I now understand as attentional training. I didn’t have a name for it then; I only knew I was tired of running.

At first, the practice was simple. I would watch traffic through the salon windows in between clients. I would feel my feet against the floor, breathe deeply, and let thoughts wander without following them. Over time, that small act of noticing became a thread that tethered me back to presence when the inner critic and noise returned.

Through study and my exploration of mindfulness, I came to understand that attention itself is an act of devotion. Reading and listening to the works of Wallace and Shapiro, who describe mindfulness as “sustained, voluntary attention continuously focused on a familiar object, without forgetfulness or distraction,” I discovered that this practice was not about forcing silence, but about returning to it gently, repeatedly, and kindly.

In the beginning, I treated mindfulness like another task to perfect. But mindfulness has no finish line. It’s not about arriving anywhere; it is about softening into awareness; however, it shows up. Slowly, I began to notice how it wove itself through the rituals of my days. The warmth of my son’s hand. The clink of dishes. The rhythm of folding clothes. The way sunlight moved while I walked in the late afternoon. It wasn’t glamorous. It was real. It was where my life was finally unfolding.

The Body as Your Anchor

When my mind wandered, my body became its homecoming. Not because I willed it, but because our bodies are always in the present moment, even when our minds are ten steps ahead or years behind. I didn’t return through grand practices or perfectly curated routines. I returned through the simplest rituals of daily life, the ones we tend to overlook entirely.

It happened in the quiet of early mornings, when my bare feet pressed against cool tiles before the house woke up. It happened at the kitchen sink, with warm water running over my hands as I washed a single cup, resisting the urge to rush to the next task. Sometimes it happened in moments I didn’t choose at all, like when grief rose without warning, and tears slipped down my cheeks. I stopped apologising for them. My body, in its wisdom, was asking me to pause, to listen, to soften.

These small, ordinary moments revealed something profound: attention itself can be a form of gentle repair. The body doesn’t need us to try harder; it needs us to notice. Every sensation we feel, the steadiness of breath, the weight of shoulders dropping, the warmth in the chest when someone you love walks into the room all becomes a doorway back to yourself.

I began to realise that mindfulness was never meant to pull me away from emotion. It wasn’t a tool to silence fear or bypass sadness and pain. It was an invitation to feel everything as it arrived, without judgment and without sprinting toward a solution. In that stillness, something unexpected happened: empathy began to take root. Not the kind I had spent years offering everyone else, but the kind I had rarely extended inward to myself.

For the first time, I could sit with my own emotions without abandoning myself. And the more I learned to be present with my own inner landscape, the more naturally I could meet others with patience, understanding, and kindness. It became clear that you cannot fully see another until you have learned to truly see yourself. Our body, steady, honest, unfiltered, shows us the way home back to ourselves if we allow it.

Love as a Teacher

Years later, I met the man who would quietly teach me how to be still. He entered my life without drama or performance, carrying a steadiness that felt unfamiliar at first, it was disarming. I had known passion, intensity, and chaos in love, but I had not known safety. My second husband has shown me that love can be soft, not a storm to endure, but a place to land and rest.

He never asked me to hurry my healing or pretend to be further along than I was. He didn’t offer advice when I curled into myself. He didn’t rush to fill my silence with solutions. Instead, he sat beside me as if my quiet was spacious enough. He matched my breath without trying, and in that simple companionship, my nervous system began to relearn what calm felt like.

There were evenings when we would sit together in a room without speaking, not because there was nothing to say, but because nothing needed to be said. His presence alone was a gentle reminder that I wasn’t alone inside my own mind anymore. Silence, which had once felt suffocating in my past marriage, became sacred in this one—a shared space instead of a divide.

He taught me that intimacy is not created through constant conversation or constant effort; sometimes it grows in the moments where two people choose to remain, side by side, unguarded. He taught me that love doesn’t demand that you perform or prove. It invites you to soften, to exhale, to be fully seen without needing to shrink or stretch yourself to fit someone else’s expectations.

Through him, I realised that mindfulness is not something practised only on a meditation cushion; it is lived in relationship. It is in the way we listen with our whole presence. The way we pause before reacting. The way we hold space for another person’s inner world without trying to control it. Mindfulness is deeply relational work.

And to be present with another — truly present — you must first learn to be present with yourself. You must be willing to sit with your own shadows, your own stories, your own ache. Only then can you offer a presence that doesn’t grasp or withdraw but meets another human being exactly where they are.

Love became my teacher not through words, but through the quiet, constant presence of someone who showed me that stillness is not emptiness; it is also connection. It is where two people begin to understand one another, not through noise, but through awareness.

The Paradox of Relaxation and Focus

Wallace and Shapiro pose a question that has shaped my understanding of mindfulness as a practice: Is focused attention opposed to relaxation, or does relaxation create the foundation for focus?

The longer I have sat with this question, the more I’ve realised that mindfulness exists in the delicate tension between these two states. It is not one or the other; it is the conversation between them.

There were days when I tried to enter mindfulness through the doorway of calm, believing I needed a perfectly settled mind before I could pay attention. But that was never how it happened. Some days, I started from chaos, my mind buzzing with unfinished tasks, a body tight with unspoken emotion, breath sitting high in my chest. Yet when I stopped fighting the internal noise and instead softened into my breath, calm began to surface on its own, not forced and not manufactured, but invited.

It felt like learning to float. I began to think of it in terms of: you don’t float in water by sheer effort; you calm yourself enough to let the water hold you. The shift from effort to trust, from control to surrender, taught me more about focus than any structured practice ever could.

Relaxation without attention becomes drift.

Attention without relaxation becomes strain.

Neither state is sustainable on its own.

Between them lies a third space, a quiet, balanced middle ground. It is not only calm, nor is it heightened concentration; it is the merging of both. A state that feels both awake and at rest, alert without anxiety, soft without collapsing.

Here the mind becomes spacious rather than scattered, steady rather than rigid. Thought still arises, but it no longer commands your attention. Emotion still moves through, but it doesn’t overwhelm you. You begin to experience clarity not as a sharpness, but as a soft luminosity that allows you to see yourself and the world with honesty and compassion.

This paradox is the quiet secret of focus: the more you soften, the more you see.

The less you force, the more you feel.

The more you allow, the more you arrive.

Mindfulness lives in this middle space where effort meets ease, and presence begins to bloom. 

The paradox of relaxation and focus reveals something we often overlook: you don’t need perfect calm to begin, and you don’t need fierce concentration to stay present. Mindfulness lives in the soft middle ground between the two. When you stop trying to control your thoughts and allow yourself to arrive in your breath, calm rises naturally. When you stop forcing attention and gently lean into awareness, clarity emerges on its own. Presence is born not from pushing or performing, but from meeting yourself exactly where you are, awake, softened, and willing to return.

What Stillness Gives Back

Stillness doesn’t erase pain; it transforms your relationship to it. It invites you to sit close to what hurts, not to suffer through it, but to understand it. In that quiet space, grief stops feeling like a punishment. It begins to feel like a teacher who speaks softly but truthfully, reminding you of what mattered, what shaped you, and what you are learning to release.

Anger, too, begins to shift. Instead of consuming you or spilling over onto the people you love, it becomes information, a message from the deeper layers of your inner world, pointing toward boundaries crossed or needs unmet. You stop running from the heat of it and start listening to what it is trying to protect you from.

And joy, which once felt fleeting or dependent on circumstance, becomes something entirely different. It becomes a state of being rather than a moment to chase. You begin to feel joy in the middle of ordinary days, not because everything is perfect, but because you are actually present for your life as it unfolds.

Slowly, life begins to reorder itself in ways you can feel but not always articulate. The things that once felt urgent lose their grip. The things that matter rise to the surface. You start noticing small things, the familiar sound of someone’s laughter, the quiet moment when you realise you are breathing more deeply than you used to.

You stop striving for perfection and begin practising presence. And presence, lived deeply and consistently, becomes a form of love for yourself, for your loved ones, and for the world you move through. It dissolves the distance between you and your own life. It restores what was neglected. It reconnects you to what is real.

Stillness gives back everything you thought you had lost. It gives you clarity, compassion, and the simple ability to be in the moment wherever you are.

Returning

Even now, my mind wanders. It jumps ahead to what might happen, loops back to what already has happened, and tries to fix things that don’t need fixing. That used to frighten me. I worried it meant I was failing at being present. But over time, I have learned the mind will always move as that’s its nature. Sometimes I stay there longer than I may realise or want to, however what matters is how I come back to the space I am in.

Returning is simple: a breath, a softening, a moment of awareness. Noticing where I am and choosing to be there, not elsewhere.

Mindfulness is never about staying in one steady state of presence. It is about remembering and forgetting, letting your attention drift and guiding it back again. Each return is a small reset, a way to reconnect with yourself rather than slip into old patterns.

Returning isn’t discipline. It is a conscious choice, a quiet gesture of self-respect. A reminder that we can begin again at any moment, pausing through an exhale to anchor in a moment to breathe easier than we did before.

And in these small, steady returns, something shifts. We feel clearer, more grounded. We stop fighting our minds and start working with them. The freedom that grows from this isn’t dramatic. It builds quietly, the way strength often does, unnoticed until the moment you feel its presence rising within you. A whisper to yourself, I am here, I am home.

Your journey with mindfulness will unfold in its own rhythm, through your quiet moments and your daily routines. If this piece has resonated with you, or if you feel curious to explore further, you can find other reflections on stillness, self-trust, emotional clarity, and gentle transformation on my blog. Each one written with the same intention: to bring you back to what is true for you, one breath, one moment, at a time. You can continue reading here.

Take your time. Feel your way through. And remember, every choice is a way forward to creating a life you love.

Ocea xx