Stillness: Daily Gifts of Solitude

Richard Mahler was a successful writer and journalist living in the L.A. fast lane. He was happily married and involved with the arts and the environment. But he found himself increasingly unwilling to accept the distracting exterior clamor of his life. He began practicing meditation and yoga and eventually left L.A. for the relative calm of Santa Fe. As he began to realize the dramatic benefits of diminishing the chaos that engulfed him, he sought an even more extreme adventure of solitudea threemonth retreat in the snowy Tusas Mountains of New Mexico.In Stillness Mahler shares what he learned on his retreat and reveals the techniques used to recreate the benefits of solitude anywhere and for any period of timeeven as brief as 3 minutes. As he tells his story, he weaves in the words of writers including Mary Oliver, Terry Tempest Williams, Steven Levine, and Anthony Storrs, presenting different inspirations and different models of solitude. He shares the results of scientific and behavioral studies and statistics that provide irrefutable evidence that silence can immeasurably improve health and wellbeing.A wider appreciation of silence and solitude can embolden and enrich us in unimaginable ways, and each of us has the power to embrace a kind of focused and purposeful silence in our own daily lives.Richard Mahler writes that one should approach silence with "an open mind, a porous heart, and a spirit of excitement and optimism." In Stillness he gives readers tools to do just that.