On quiet mornings I sometimes sit near water before I sit anywhere else. A still pond is one of the best teachers I know.
Throw a stone into it and the surface breaks, and then rings go out, wider and fainter, until they reach the reeds and are gone. The pond does not do anything about the stone. It does not try to smooth itself. It does not resist, and it does not hurry. It lets the rings run their course, and then it is still again, as still as it was before, as if stillness had been underneath the whole time.
Stillness is not the absence of rings
People often imagine meditation as achieving a surface without ripples. A mind with no thoughts, a body with no sensations. But a pond is not still because nothing ever falls into it. A pond is still because it lets what falls in settle.
You are not trying to be a pond nothing falls into. You are practising being water.
This is freeing, once it lands. It means a noisy mind is not a problem to be solved before you can begin. The noise is the stone. The practice is the widening, fading rings. The stillness is what was underneath all along, and it comes back on its own.
On the page
If you move your hand across the water on the Daily Pause home page, you will make rings. It was built that way on purpose. Leave it alone for a while and watch the surface go back to the sky.