Deep listening — whether to the stones in the wall of our house, to the birdsong outside, or to our companion across the kitchen table — joins us to the living world. It melts the judging mind, it softens the separation between our own consciousness and that of life itself. That softening is true relaxation, the release of the tensions in the cells of the body; and with that relaxation of body as well as of mind, stillness arises.
— Roger Housden, Ten Poems to Set You Free