The Monkey 🐒 ← Point 7
Taming the restless mind—how learning the art of stillness can unlock presence, depth, and joy.
Point 7 can manifest in the form of The Monkey, swinging from tree to tree, constantly jumping around from one thing to the next.
The Monkey represents our restless nature—a mind that can't stay in one place.
A body that feels agitated and tense.
A nervous system wired for perpetual stimulation.
When identified with the Monkey, you'll notice your attention splitting in multiple directions at once.
You begin tasks but abandon them minutes later.
Your conversations leap wildly between topics.
You interrupt yourself with new ideas before finishing thoughts.
The Monkey fears missing out.
If you settle on one branch, what about all the other, possibly better branches?
What if there are sweeter bananas on some other tree?
The Monkey fragments your experience into disconnected moments rather than a coherent flow.
You jump from peak to peak, missing the valleys where meaning often hides.
The cruel irony: life feels simultaneously overstimulating and deeply unsatisfying.
Full of activity but strangely empty.
It's exhausting—for you and for others.
You check your phone, fidget, pace—anything to avoid stillness.
Silence feels threatening. Empty. Something to be filled.
The Monkey dreads stillness because in that quiet space, uncomfortable truths emerge.
Painful emotions you've been outrunning finally catch up.
Grief. Regret. Loneliness. Inadequacy.
The Monkey knows that stillness invites vulnerability—and vulnerability feels dangerous.
But what The Monkey doesn't understand is that this very stillness it fears contains treasures beyond price.
In stillness, you discover presence—the ability to fully inhabit your life rather than constantly reaching for the next moment.
You access depth—the rich dimensions of existence that can only be perceived when attention settles.
Stillness reveals subtlety—the quiet whispers of intuition drowned out by constant movement.
It fuels creativity and discovery—not the frenetic generation of ideas, but the profound insights that emerge from deeper consciousness.
It cultivates resilience—not by avoiding difficulty, but by building capacity to be with whatever arises.
And perhaps most surprisingly, stillness offers a peculiar kind of joy—not the fleeting high of constant stimulation, but the steady warmth of simply being.
The Monkey's frantic activity conceals a profound insecurity—a lack of trust that simply being present could ever be enough.
Its locomotion is a desperate attempt to outrun the underlying anxiety that drives it forward, always seeking but never finding what would allow it to finally rest.
The Monkey cannot comprehend that what it's frantically searching for in endless movement might actually be waiting in the very stillness it avoids.
That the restless pursuit of fulfillment creates the very emptiness it's trying to escape.