Tijn Tjoelker on Substack

Bell of Mindfulness

Upon your arrival you might hear a bell sound and suddenly people around you have stopped still, stopped talking, and stopped moving. It might be the telephone ringing or the clock chiming, or the monastery bell sounding. These are our bells of mindfulness. When we hear the sound of the bell we relax our body and become aware of

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The world can reach out for you, without thought or plan and, in reaching, reach into your depths. If you have ever sat quietly listening to the sound of the rain, you might have had the experience that after a while you can’t tell what is rain and what is you. It can be an intimate sound, as if the rain were falling through your chest. Sometimes i

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“Slow down and tune into our seismographs.” The invitation is to practice “sensing to the depths” by finding one’s own inner still point, dropping through the layers of white noise, or using a finely-tuned instrument to hear the subtle signals.

What do we sense from our different perspectives? What do we “hear” and what are the different qualities o... See more

This is the quiet art of living well. It does not demand that we abandon the world, but that we engage with it more mindfully. It asks that we slow down, that we look more closely, that we listen more carefully. For in doing so, we discover that much of what we seek—clarity, peace, even strength—was always within reach. It was simply waiting for us

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It’s a living world. We can listen to it. We can open to it. It’s not a machine that we poke and press and push a button. It’s a mystery. And we meet the mystery, and then it talks.