Meditative Moments with David Steindl-Rast

Video Transcript

I think I discovered it already when I was a little boy. I think children have a natural inclination to be meditative and contemplative, and I discovered how pleasant and joyful it was and peaceful to just sit and be quiet.

It’s good to have an external environment that is quiet, that makes it easier to go into the inner stillness… it doesn’t depend on it, but nature has its own stillness that helps very much to foster the inner stillness.

When you really go deep inside you come in contact with something that goes beyond words and you cannot really describe it. I would speak of a vast wideness, openness, something like the desert, the sand dunes, or the starry sky by night… this openness and spaciousness and stillness, great stillness.

I think I feel energized and focused and clear. I don’t feel too much of a tension between the two states. The going inside is more like taking a firm stand on the rock on which you stand, and then you stand up and you act. The two are very closely connected with one another. But I’m calmer and more ready to act after I have gone inside.

When I go within myself I feel that I have discovered something over which death has no power. Life and death are constant change but I have found something that is one and unchanging inside.