The Ocean Within

Stillness in the Absence of Self

I sat on my yoga mat, resting after an intense training session. My body was tired, but my mind was calm as I gazed out the window. The world outside was quiet, yet something inside me felt even quieter, like an ocean with no waves, a vast stillness that reached every corner of my being.

I felt nothing.

I sat there, surrounded by this emptiness, this void that filled me from the inside, and I found myself at peace with it.

There was no struggle, no rush to fill it or fix it.

Everything—every thought, every sensation, every belief—had dissolved as if this silence had swallowed it. I didn’t hear the stories that usually ran through my head. I didn’t see the labels, the judgments. The ideas of who I am, what I’ve done, and what I need to become—gone, as though they never existed. They had vanished, absorbed by the vast emptiness within me.

At that moment, I realized I no longer knew who I was, and strangely, I loved that feeling.

This unknowing, vast, open space inside me felt liberating, like I had finally released the weight I didn’t even know I was carrying. I didn’t feel the urge to fill this void with meaning or purpose, answers or explanations.

I wasn’t afraid of it. I embraced it, feeling a sense of relief and freedom from the burden of identity and purpose.

I didn’t want to replace what was gone. Not yet. There was no desire to rush toward something else, to find a new identity or construct a new narrative. Instead, I wanted to linger in this in-between state, in this threshold where the old had fallen away, but the new had yet to emerge.

I wanted to let whatever was rising from within—the essence of who I am—take shape in its own time.

I didn’t even feel the need to ask the usual questions: Who am I? What is my purpose? Those questions suddenly seemed irrelevant, unnecessary. The answers weren’t important right now.

There was no urgency to define myself, to know, to understand. This lack of urgency brought a sense of ease and relief, reducing the pressure to have all the answers.

I was standing at the bridge between formlessness and form, between what was and what will be, between the death of the old and the birth of something new.

It felt like I was suspended between fear and love, between the known and the unknown, and I realized that this place, this bridge, was precisely where I needed to be.

In this suspension, I felt a unique balance and harmony, a sense of being exactly where I needed to be.

Wherever I am now, it’s a place I am meant to experience fully, without rushing through it, without needing to change or escape it. I am here to live it, to feel it, to breathe it in.

There are no more words to explain this or ideas to hold on to...

Just silence, just stillness.

Just bliss.

Michela xo

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