The Most Healing Thing I’ve Ever Done Required Nothing | Stephen Simmang

The hardest and easiest thing you'll ever do is sit still.

To just be.

It requires no effort. No strategy. No accomplishment. And yet, in a world that worships movement, it feels impossible.

I learned this not in a monastery or on a retreat, but in my living room, when I had nothing left.

About two and a half years ago, I began dabbling in meditation. At first, I didn’t really know what I was doing. I thought meditation was something I had to achieve, a state I could get to. So I tried hard. I chased peace like a task. It was clumsy, inconsistent, but it was something. In retrospect, it was less about getting it right and more about building a capacity within me, a quiet preparation I didn’t recognize at the time.

Because just as I was beginning to notice how much I lived inside my mind, how fully I had identified with thoughts, stories, planning, and interpretation, life, as it does, cracked open.

My marriage ended. My wife and I separated. And my two-year-old daughter was now at the center of a disorienting rupture.

I found myself in a free fall.

There was no shelf to reach for. No tool that felt useful. The pain was beyond language. Therapy, though valuable in some seasons, suddenly felt like endless rumination. Prayer, at least the kind where I begged God for answers, only reminded me of how far I felt from any.

I had spent years building a belief system, a framework that gave me a sense of certainty.

But in this space, belief had no weight. No matter how true it sounded, I couldn't feel its relevance. The mind will often cling to theology when the heart is breaking, but I needed something more direct than doctrine. I needed presence.

So I started sitting.

Not to escape the pain, but to feel it more truthfully. Without commentary. Without judgment. Without trying to fix it.

It was agony at first. The thoughts came fast, the emotions faster. But the more I stayed, the more I noticed the space around them. Rupert Spira speaks of awareness not as something we practice, but as what we are. I began to understand that. I wasn’t sitting as the pain. I was sitting with it.

I had heard Eckhart Tolle say, “Rather than being your thoughts and emotions, be the awareness behind them.” And that’s exactly what began to happen.

In those moments, I found a quiet I had never known. A silence that wasn’t empty, but alive. Spacious. Stable.

And then came something else.

As I sat more and more in stillness, I noticed that my experience of faith also began to shift, not through study, but through silence. I had grown up in a Christian context and still carry much of that with me. But I began to see how much emphasis had been placed on believing the right things, when in truth, Jesus’ invitation was to embody His way of being. After all, Christian means “little Christ.” And the invitation wasn’t just to believe in Him, but to become like Him. Not to cling to words about Him, but to move with His posture, His presence.

That shift wasn’t rebellion. It wasn’t a theological pivot. It was quiet. It was internal. And it was born in stillness.

It was also in this stillness that I began to recognize something else: the mind is not who I am. For years, I had built my identity on thinking, planning, analyzing, fixing, controlling. The internal dialogue was constant. But as I sat with no agenda, no words, no thinking to prop me up, I discovered the one thing I hadn’t accessed before, being itself.

I wasn’t trying to get anywhere. I was here.

And here, it turns out, was enough.

This is the paradox: It is the simplest thing, to just sit and be. But it is also the hardest. Especially when your entire life has been built around the mind’s movements. Especially when the world rewards performance, output, articulation. Especially when your pain demands resolution, and the culture tells you to solve it fast.

But stillness does not solve. It holds.

And that holding, that sacred pause, is what softened the grief. It didn’t erase it. But it gave it breath. Space. Room to settle.

I had heard beautiful ideas before. Podcasts, sermons, books. But this was different. This wasn’t about spiritual performance. This wasn’t about correct beliefs. This was about truth that worked, not because I understood it, but because I encountered it.

Belief means little when you're in agony. Doctrine doesn’t hold your hand when you're gasping for air. What matters in those moments is not what you believe, but what you can experience.

Not concepts. Contact.

Not information. Presence.

And presence, I learned, is always here. Always now.

You don't need to chase it. You just need to stop long enough to feel what remains when all else falls away.

That’s what stillness gave me.

~ Stephen Simmang