The Experiment
The 10 Territories of The Experiment 🌿
Over the next 10 weeks we will move through 10 areas of life - one at a time, with full attention and intention.
Think of each as a territory we enter together. We are here to explore, to see it clearly, feel it fully, and experiment with what shifts when we bring conscious awareness to it.
Week 1 — Body
Week 2 — Mind
Week 3 — Spirit
Week 4 — Time
Week 5 — Stillness
Week 6 — Creativity
Week 7 — Relationship
Week 8 — Nature
Week 9 — Vision
Week 10 — Integration
Each week builds on the last. By week 10 you will have touched every layer of your life - intentionally, experimentally, with awareness you didn't have before.
Week 5 - Stillness 🤍
"Empty yourself of everything. Let the mind become still. The ten thousand things rise and fall while the Self watches their return. Returning to the source is stillness, which is the way of nature." - Tao
Welcome to your fifth open buffet.
This week our territory is Stillness.
I want to begin by saying what it is not; stillness is not rest because rest recovers the body. Stillness meets something deeper than the body.
It is the space that holds feeling without being affected by it. Stillness is not emptiness or boredom. It is the ground beneath everything - the silence between notes that makes music possible.
Most of us have never truly chosen stillness. We have collapsed into it when exhausted, stumbled into it in nature or in grief, found it briefly at the end of a long meditation. But to choose it deliberately, regularly, as its own practice - that is rarer. And it is what we are invited to explore this week.
What we discover in stillness varies. Some find peace. Some find what they have been avoiding. Some find that the life they are living is deeply aligned. Some find that something needs to change. All of these are valid. All of these are clues and answers.
Below is your menu. Choose one from each category, something that genuinely calls to you, let your instinct lead.
Trust your first instinct.
I invite you to explore this menu with this track: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qjgDXtZ1jrw
➕ ADD: choose one stillness practice to bring in this week
A daily "do nothing" window - 10 to 20 minutes of genuinely nothing. No phone, no book, no task, no meditation app guiding you somewhere. Just you, sitting or lying, with whatever is here. Resist the urge to make it useful. Let it be completely purposeless.
A morning silence practice - commit to not speaking for the first 20 to 30 minutes after waking. Before the first word leaves your mouth, let there be quiet. Notice what the morning tastes like without the words.
A daily body stillness - one full savasana each day, 10 to 15 minutes, outside of any yoga class and not as cool-down. Just for itself. Horizontal, eyes closed, nothing to become. Let the body surrender.
A gazing practice - choose one natural object each day (a tree, the sky, a flame, water moving) and give it your undivided attention for 5 to 10 minutes. Not analyzing it, not photographing it. Just meeting it. This is one of the oldest forms of meditation that exists.
An evening digital sunset - all screens off one hour before bed, replaced with genuine quiet. No transition content, no final scroll, no one more thing. Just the hour before sleep as a threshold.
Your own choice - any practice that brings you into genuine, chosen contact with stillness.
➖ REMOVE: choose one thing to release from your relationship with stillness this week
Background noise as default - the unconscious habit of always having something playing - music, podcast, TV, a video in another room - so that silence never quite arrives. This week, experiment with silence as the default and sound as the occasional guest. Notice how quickly the urge to fill returns, and what it is covering.
Filling every pause - the reflex to reach for the phone the moment a gap appears; in a queue, in a traffic light, in a minute between tasks, in the gap between sending a message and receiving a reply. This week, let the gap be a gap. In the zen buddhist course I took last year there was an invitation to transcend “the waiting” and letting the moment just be.
The belief that stillness is laziness - the deeply conditioned idea that not producing, not moving, not consuming, not being useful is somehow wrong or indulgent. This belief is worth examining this week, not to resolve it philosophically but to simply watch it as it arises and feel what it is protecting.
Productive restlessness - the inability to sit with a feeling without immediately processing it, naming it, writing about it, sharing it, or moving it toward resolution. This week, practice simply letting something be present without doing anything with it. Feelings do not always require a response. Sometimes they just are.
Talking to fill space - choose one conversation this week where you allow more silence than usual. Let a pause breathe before filling it. Let the other person finish without immediately continuing. Notice what becomes available in the spaces between words.
Your own choice - any habit that keeps stillness at a distance by keeping you in motion.
🌀 DEEPEN: choose one to commit to for the full week
Map your own relationship with stillness - each evening this week, spend 5 minutes with these two questions: when did I feel most still today and what was happening? When did I feel most restless and what was I avoiding? Over the course of the week observe what creates stillness and what disrupts it.
A nature stillness sit - one extended sit in nature this week, minimum 30 minutes, with no agenda except arrival. No journaling, no guiding audio, no phone. Just your body in a living place, doing nothing. If thoughts arise let them. If feelings arise let them. You are not meditating toward something. You are simply being somewhere.
Explore one teaching on stillness from any tradition - Eckhart Tolle on Presence, the Buddhist practice of shamatha (calm abiding), the Christian contemplative tradition of centering prayer, Taoism's wu wei (non-doing), Ramana Maharshi on the natural state. Choose one that genuinely interests you and give it 30 minutes of real engagement. Find resonance, a new vocabulary for something that is familiar for you.
A stillness inquiry - choose one question and sit with it each day this week, not to answer it but to feel it: what am I afraid I will find in the silence? Let different answers arrive on different days. Write nothing down until the week ends.
Deepen an existing sitting practice with less effort - if you meditate already, this week the invitation is not to do more but to try doing less inside it. Less controlling of the breath. Less managing of thoughts. Less trying to arrive somewhere.
Your own choice.
A few notes before you choose 🌿
Read the menu, read the moon cycle guide and listen to yourself. There is no right answer and no comparison. What one person removes another may need to add.
Once you have chosen please write your three choices in your notebook with today's date. If you can, make it your phone screen saver (using Canva if you fancy fancy :) or by just typing it in notes and adding to the screen saver) so you have a constant reminder. Then share them here in the group so we can hold each other's intentions.
I will share individual guidance from your natal charts tomorrow after you place your menu selection. General recommendations aligned with the lunar cycle are on the separate page.