a feeling, especially when it is a feeling that some people have never experienced. The trouble is that "our culture insists that we classify experience in terms of words, and that we do it immediately. If we can't lasso and hog-tie an experience with a word or a phrase, then we're led to believe the experience isn't quite real." However, I feel it is essential to further explain this experience because it is something so beautiful and so powerful that everybody should at least have an idea of its existence.
             In Yoga: The Spirit and Practice of Moving into Stillness, Erich Schiffman uses the analogy of a spinning top to explain his concept of stillness. Try to picture the image of a spinning top. When a spinning top is spun perfectly, it seems to not be moving at all. But it only appears this way because it is spinning so fast. Our lives are generally not like a perfectly spinning top, they are into more of a chaotic spin. Schiffman explains that "we know we're alive because at least we're still spinning, but we are not quite perfectly centered, and we are not spinning anywhere near full speed. We don't have as much energy as we'd like, we are not experiencing as much aliveness as we might, nor are we experiencing the peace of stillness or the joy of being." We are in a chaotic spin because we are generally not wholehearted toward what we are doing. Our attention is often spread over several thoughts, and we are not fully participating. When this happens, our "energy circulation b!
             ecomes constricted, and the creative life force is unable to flow." The energy is always within us, it just doesn't flow. When we are participating fully, we are not inhibiting our flow of energy, and so we experience a rush of vigor, of life. That is the point where we experience ourselves in stillness. Stillness is not a lack of energy or movement, but rather life in harmony with ...