We're told again and again that the cure for our emptiness is always away from ourselves. The promise: there will be some product or some experience that will make us feel whole again.

Eat. Shop. Work harder, for longer. Watch this TV show. Wear these clothes.It's no wonder we consume so much. The distraction of consumption, with all its promises, never adequately fills the hole we're longing to fill.But there is another direction to turn - back into intimate contact with our own lives. This requires us to cultivate a relationship with stillness, with quiet, with practices and with relationships that allow us to be just here rather than spinning away into distraction so frequently.Here we might find ourselves able to be with our own emptiness, the yawning anxiety that there is nothing to hold us. And, paradoxically, in our sustained encounter with nothing, find that we are held by everything, by all of life, without our having to do anything at all.When we know our own holes but do not move to fill them, when there is no running away to do, we can start to live deeply in the lives we are living, knowing that emptiness is as much a part of our humanity as our love, our fulfilment, and our joy.

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