Have Pen and Paper by Your Side
I will write down anything that I want to remember after my time of stillness.
I try to engage in a time of stillness and meditation every day. My main goal when practicing stillness is to increase my awareness of God. I attempt to perceive God for who He really is in my life. At the same time, I hope to cultivate personal humility by decreasing my view of myself. I hope to come away with a proper perspective of myself in comparison to God. I'm simply trying to follow what John the baptizer once declared: "He must increase, but I must decrease" (Jn. 3:30 ESV). I desire to increase my view of God while decreasing my view of myself.
But stillness is a hard spiritual exercise to master. The reason I personally have trouble with stillness is because of the many thoughts running around in my own brain. A plethora of thoughts come to mind whenever I sit in silence trying to focus on God. I think about errands that I need to do. I think about the future. I think about conversations that I recently had. I think about work and anything I still need to get done. These thoughts easily plague my mind as I attempt to practice stillness and meditation.
I try not to be bothered by this. I remind myself that having wandering thoughts is normal. I accept this as a personal reality. Whenever I catch myself drifting away, I gently bring myself back to focusing on God. One of the things I do to help me focus on God during stillness and meditation is to have a piece of paper and a pen by my side. On this particular sheet of paper, I will write down anything that I want to remember after my time of stillness. Sometimes, I'm thinking about something that's actually important and I don't want to forget about it. For example, I might be thinking about an important email that I need to send to somebody. I'll write that important thing down so that I can have the freedom to forget about it for a while knowing that I will be able to recall it later.
This is a simple and effective technique to relieve me of some of my thoughts and allow me to better focus on honoring God during my time of stillness. If you find your mind wandering a lot during prayer, stillness, and meditation, try writing some of these thoughts down on paper so that you can easily put it aside for the time being. If there are important things that you don't want to forget, you will be able to easily recall them later when you're done with your time of stillness with God.
Barnabas the Monastic
Servant of Christ. Husband. Dad. Modern Monastic. I have a wild ambition in life: get as close to the Lord Jesus Christ as I can while on earth. I explore and integrate ancient Christian monk wisdom in modern everyday life. Lives in Canada.
