In this blog series, I’ve gathered six beloved quotes, sayings, and prayers – teachings that have arrived in timely moments, offering solace, comfort, and healing throughout the years. I share the lessons they’ve offered me, along with simple ways you can work with them yourself. My hope is that you find small doses of healing here. Gentle reminders to bring you home. Guideposts for the way back to remembering.
Here begins the first of the six reflections:
“Compose yourself in stillness, draw your attention inward and devote your mind to the Self. The wisdom you seek lies within.” ~ attributed to the Bhagavad Gita
There is magic and mystery in this phrase. The words do not land as a command — they arrive as a beckoning, stirring the deep, ancient longing to know oneself.
For me, the hook has always been the final line:
“The wisdom you seek lies within.”
Everything before it is the map — a quiet set of directions leading toward an ornate treasure chest.
Compose yourself.
Turn inward.
Devote your mind to the Self
And inside, the sweetest treasure — the heart: a self-generating source of clarity, truth, and inner guidance.
We don’t always remember this. Life pulls our attention outward, louder than the whisper of the Self. Yet when the heart opens — when stillness reveals its quiet guidance — something profound stirs. Over time, this knowing grows from an occasional glimpse into a way of being. Embodiment.
The Night the Teaching Became Real
For a long time, these were only words. Then, the truth began to live through me.
It happened when I lived in Indonesia, immersed in Balinese culture — an intricate weaving of animism and Hinduism. Daily life there is filled with offerings, placed everywhere you can imagine, honoring deities, ancestors, and the spirits that inhabit all aspects of nature.
The Bhagavad Gita, the text to which this quote is attributed, is held as their living scripture — teaching meditation as a discipline of remembrance and pointing to the heart as the seat of devotion and realization.
It was the eve of the Balinese New Year. The village throbbed with music and movement. Papier-mache effigies — large, fearsome, and dazzling — were carried through the streets to drive away negative energies. The night culminated in a ritual act of purification as effigies were burned, marking the passage from chaos into stillness.
Then came Nyepi, the Balinese Day of Silence.
For twenty-four hours, the entire island went quiet – no cars, no lights, no footsteps moving about. An entire culture turning inward at once. A sacred collective reset.
I set up my altar on my veranda beneath the stars, ready to welcome the New Year in silence. As evening gave way to night, the stillness became alive — thick, humming, vibrant — settling over everything like a soft, luminous veil.
I’ve meditated in groups many times, feeling the resonance of shared intention. However, Nyepi was something else entirely. Trees breathed the silence. The air was still. Not a dog barked. Even the mosquitoes bowed to the quiet.
Within a few soft breaths, my heart began pulsing and expanding as though breathing itself. Golden light moved and orbed through and around me. My awareness floated, dissolving into harmony — pulsing, expanding, softening at the edges. Thoughts disappeared. Mind still.
I was both the earth and the stars and everything in between.
Without question, the collective hum of a thousand quiet hearts—this shared biofield—carried me straight into my center. In this way, my heart opening was as magical as opening the ornate treasure chest. Tender, luminous peace blossomed from within—treasures found!
The Heart as the Seat of Knowing
In Traditional Chinese Medicine, the Heart (Shen) is the seat of mind, spirit, and consciousness. The heart and mind are not separate. The heart is the throne of clarity, unity, and truth. It is also the home of the indwelling spirit—the Self.
Yet knowing this is one thing.
Feeling it is another.
Embodiment is the teacher.
This is what the quote reveals:
The inner world is not a concept to master — it is a relationship to cultivate.
To compose yourself in stillness is to gather your scattered parts — attention, breath, presence — and bring them home. Stillness, practiced with intention, becomes the devotion through which the heart reveals itself. The inner world ceases to be abstract and grows intimate, dependable, trustworthy — comforting.
In this way, stillness becomes a quiet practice of sovereignty: a gentle declaration that you will meet yourself before you meet the world.
This is coherence:
A remembering,
A return,
A quiet rejoining of mind and heart,
thought and knowing.
To move from the idea of stillness into the living thrum of it — begin with the breath. Let the mind descend from the head and settle into the chest.
A Tender Practice for Cultivating Inner Stillness: The Smiling Heart Qi Gong Ritual
Compose yourself in a quiet, comfortable place.
Take a few belly breaths, feeling your body settle.
Place both your hands over heart.
With each inhale, smile softly by gently lifting the corners of your mouth upward.
Imagine directing this smile into your heart.
Exhale a slow and audible ‘hawww’—a long, sighing release—letting the sound wash through the heart, clearing any discordant energies.
Continue….
Inhale with the subtle smile directed toward your heart.
Exhale “hawww,” releasing any worries in the heart.
Stay for 5-10 minutes. When finished, take note of how you feel: the quality of your mind, spaciousness of your heart, perhaps even warmth within your palms.
This simple ritual stimulates the heart’s biofield, offers clarity and invites emotional harmony. The stillness it cultivates opens the gateway for the heart-mind coherence.
And the wisdom you seek is just one of many shining treasures that await within.
Blessed be ~
