Finding Stillness at the Heart of Chaos

✍️ Stillness is not the absence of chaos; it is born from within it.

I vividly remember a specific dinner table conversation in 1973. I was 12 years old, and my parents had decided to relocate to a smaller town. We had only been in our current home for two years, and it felt like a failed experiment. In a bid to shield me and my brother from the street life's insanity—drugs, violence, intellectual poverty—they bought a big house with a garden, far from the hellish high-rise we lived in.

But from my perspective, it wasn’t good news. Inside, I felt tremendous chaos—fear, anger. I cried in denial, "This can’t be happening," pleaded and begged, though I knew it was in vain. 1973 was way before the internet would allow me to stay connected, hence this move meant losing my friends, my connections, everything I had built at great cost. I couldn’t fathom the loss.

During my childhood, my parents moved every two years on average, mostly following my mother’s teaching assignments. Each relocation meant new schools, lost friends, and lots of tears. Being smaller than average, I was always a target for bullies. I endured beatings, theft, and sexual harassment, and paid a high price to fit in. For me, movement meant chaos, danger, and frequent visits to the ER. While others might describe childhood as a precious and carefree time, mine was closer to hell, a period I was eager to leave behind.

Yet, ironically, I became adept at survival. I excelled at navigating chaos. Unaware of the skills I had developed, I turned them into a professional asset.

For thirty years, I worked in some of the most chaotic, unstable, and dangerous environments—from wars to natural disasters to refugee camps. I dedicated myself to bringing relief to civilians living in chaos. I became a chaos professional! I wired my system for fight or flight, becoming addicted to adrenaline—a junkie for a good cause.

“Chaos, oh my dear friend, my great teacher, you taught me stillness”. The more chaotic the world outside, the more stillness I created inside to balance it out. And stillness is an even greater teacher.

Stillness taught me to see through chaos, to understand life beyond appearances. I remember my first meditation experience years later: I wondered what everyone was trying to achieve. I already knew stillness and didn’t need to do anything to find it. Chaos had been my meditation teacher for years by then.

Fast forward to today.

We live in an unhealthy, apathetic society. From Stockholm in the '70s to Rio in the '90s, and all the following Earth Summits, still, we have not done anything significant that the average street person would remember. This fact I've been aware of for many decades, but now it's becoming obvious to most. We are disconnected from our planet, from each other, from ourselves. It’s painful to observe and even more painful to experience. Interestingly, that awareness has also become part of my job.

Coach, mentor, guide—whatever label you prefer, I dislike them all. I am here to serve my fellow earthlings by sharing the human condition, in love. But I see the dysfunction all too clearly.

And I also see the lack of movement, the fear of change, the stagnancy. Again, there is stillness, but a different aspect of it—retentive, attached, clinging to what we know out of fear of the unknown, out of fear of chaos. And because these two have been my most faithful life companions, I know what is coming to shake us out of this apathy: chaos!

Chaos is coming to bring change, movement, and a possibility to evolve. We don’t have to wait for chaos to change; we could choose to change before it is upon us, but I doubt we will. This would require more maturity than we currently possess.

To implement change before chaos forces our hand requires taking responsibility, and we don’t like that. So instead of being ahead of the game, we will likely have to adapt, if that’s even an option anymore. I call this learning from love or learning from pain. Most humans wait for pain until they choose to learn.

In any case, chaos and stillness will continue to dance.

If, like me, you have been trained in the East, instead of just seeing chaos and stillness, you will see Purusha and Prakriti, Shiva and Shakti, the eternal Shiva linga—consciousness and matter-energy, the two most fundamental elements in the universe after the great oneness.

So when chaos shows up, (see my previous posts “An Initiation by Fire” and “Aghori, the science of discomfort”) I observe my feelings, my emotions at first. But I don’t move. I let the inner chaos subside. I look through it—through the fear, the denial, the anger—until I find stillness again. Failing to do so would only add chaos to an already chaotic situation. And when I am still, I do my best to balance the external chaos with internal stillness.

Call it alchemy, call it transmission, call it manifestation, call it mastery: when the inner experience influences the outer experience (and not the other way around), we are in conscious creator mode. Until we transcend the inner chaos, we are in victim creator mode, acting from fear instead of Love, and creating more of what we don't want in the process.

As chaos and stillness continue their eternal dance, I wonder: Are we ready to step into the rhythm, or will we wait until the music forces our hand? And when you finally reach a place of stillness, can you feel the chaos stirring within those around you? Can you see the dance unfolding within them?

With Infinite Love