Stillness As Depth: Holding Emotion Without Being Overwhelmed

Read time 2 minutes. Stillness As Depth is a stand alone article in our Spiritual Immersion series.

In Sometimes the Flood, we saw that the flood can cleanse.
Sometimes the flood can bowl you over.

But nothing overtakes you
when you know you are larger
than what moves through you.

People confuse stillness with shutdown.
With numbness.
With some get your Zen on performance.

But stillness isn’t glass.
It isn’t ice.

Stillness is depth.

A ripple. A wake. A tidal wave.
A single source.
All are sacred waters.
Stillness holds them all.

Detachment is escape.
Depth is capacity.

The capacity to bear.
To hold.
To handle.

We mistake stillness for the absence of motion—
a calm surface where you can see your reflection.

But who even is that person looking back?
The truth is deeper than the image.

We are told: don’t overfill your bowl.
It never occurs to us to think:
Why not bring a deeper one?

When our bowl is shallow,
every step is stiff and rehearsed.
We tiptoe through our own lives.
Depth walks itself to the table.

A shallow bowl spills at the smallest tremor.
A deep well can drink the storm.

The drop that brushes your skin,
the wave that knocks you flat.
Neither is too small to matter.
Neither is too big to survive.

They say: You are not the wave—you are the ocean.
But the truth is—
you are both.

The ocean is Tao.
Infinite depth.

We cultivate this same depth—
less wavelike.
More Tao.

Emotion is movement.
Stillness is not the opposite.
Depth holds both.
Unseen currents moving below.

You don’t have to mute your feelings to be still.
You don’t figure them out.

To feel them exactly as they are is to speak their language—
in silence, in stillness.

Let the story dissolve.

You are not sinking into the deep—
that’s getting lost.

You are the depth of being.
Where every wave is already held.

Even the storm.

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