Standing Nowhere
What if the point isn’t to find answers—but to sit with the mystery?
Standing Nowhere invites you into a space of breath, laughter, and deep listening. Through soulful conversations and honest reflections, we explore awakening, healing, and what it means to be human. It’s about letting go, waking up, and remembering who we are beneath the noise. Join us as we sit with the sacred, the silly, and everything in between—from deep chats to spontaneous insight. Come as you are.
Standing Nowhere
Episode 9: Trust the Silence — Listening Beneath the Noise
“Live in the nowhere that you come from, even though you have an address here.” Rumi’s words echo through this gentle exploration of stillness amidst chaos. In a noisy sushi bar on a Friday night, Jacob quietly drafts an episode about silence — an irony that becomes an invitation into deeper presence.
He shares how daily spiritual practice has become his lifeline. As a gig worker and father stretched thin by extreme hours, financial strain, and heartache, Jacob finds solace each morning in a simple ritual of sitting in stillness. When life feels overwhelming — a broken-down car, the pang of missing his young son, the pull of old habits — returning to the breath carries him when his mind can’t. In these moments, letting go isn’t defeat but a subtle act of trust.
Woven throughout are glimmers of wisdom from many paths. Jacob recalls Jesus’s Beatitudes in their original Aramaic, revealing hidden layers of meaning (meekness as humble gentleness, sorrow as sacred openness). He leans on Meister Eckhart’s reminder that “there is nothing so much like God as silence,” and finds validation in a Pixar film’s lesson that embracing sadness is a step toward healing. From the Dalai Lama’s logic (“if you can fix it, why worry? If you can’t, why worry?”) to Chuang Tzu’s archer who loses his ease when a prize is at stake, the message is clear: our frantic striving only divides us from our natural skill, our innate peace.
At the heart of it all is Jacob’s hard-won understanding that surrender is a strength, not a weakness. He speaks candidly about being “cracked open” by despair — a moment when continuing to exist felt harder than not. That breaking point became a breakthrough: an entry into a life of practice, where love and stillness are two sides of the same coin. Through tears in meditation at 3 AM, through accepting help from friends and strangers when pride would have resisted, he discovers a powerful truth: when we finally release our tight control, we make room for grace.
This episode is a warm companion for anyone feeling adrift. It’s a reminder that you are not a separate mistake of the universe — you are an intelligent part of an intelligent whole. In the intimate, compassionate style of Standing Nowhere, Jacob extends a hand: inviting us to sit in silence each day, to trust the whisper of the soul, and to find that unshakable “nowhere” within. Come as you are, tears and all, and know that in this shared stillness, you’re already home. 🕊️
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Hello and welcome back everyone to the Standing Nowhere podcast. I'm your host, Jacob Buehler, and it is a pleasure to be back with you. Just a quick note before we dive in, there are cross-tradition reflections ahead, and the Aramaic renderings are devotional, and I keep the quotations verbatim. This episode I was outlining and planning on a Friday night. during a pickup at a noisy and busy sushi bar. And I thought that was pretty funny that I was surrounded by laughter and music, and yet I was quietly drafting an episode on stillness. In this episode, I wanted to really emphasize the importance of a daily spiritual practice or cultivating a trust in the silence inside of you to carry you when your mind can't. The more we try to control things with our mind and figure things out on our own, the more we experience anxiety and stress. And to some degree, of course, our intellect does have to solve problems, yes, but we don't always need to be thinking all day long. It takes a lot of horsepower out of your engine, basically, when you're running thought loops all day. And when you start to practice and cultivate a practice on a daily basis, you'll find by default that you rest more and more in your body or the sensations that arise momentarily. that you kind of surf on the present instead of drowning in the past or the future, the projected future that you worry about. The Christian mystic Meister Eckhart, who I've quoted on the podcast many times before, he has a quote that says, And he's also said that the word is hidden in the soul. There it is heard only in silence. If you want to hear it, you must be silent. If you speak, you cannot hear. There is no place for listening where there is speaking. You must be silent. Then the word is heard. And that's where in silence... We start to see what's actually inside of us. And some people are afraid of that silence. Again, not just letting go of your control with your intellect, but also facing what is going on inside of you. There could be inner turmoil. And that turmoil is causing problems in your life, whether you want to face it or not. And I was doing a lot of things in my life to cover it up. Having a little puff on the pipe at the end of the day, filling all my time with TV or a lot of it or video games. There's so many things in life that we use to distract us. And you've all heard me on a couple of episodes in the past shed some tears while recording. And it's not a bad thing because When you're meditating and you're more present with yourself, you're gonna see things that come up to the surface, which is very healthy. For me, the last couple of weeks that I've recorded, I have been experiencing higher than my usual levels of fatigue from not only my high work hours, but also mental fatigue, dealing with repairing my car. A couple of days ago, my radiator fan just went out on top of all the issues that I talked about in past episodes. Luckily, my brother was there to save the day again. And he popped in a new, what is it, radiator fan assembly, I think it was called. It only took him a couple of hours, but that causes stress. I also mentioned that I was detoxing from quitting cannabis at the end of the day. I also quit energy drinks recently. And these things, they force you to kind of be with a lot of things that were underneath the surface that you didn't really notice before. There's a lot of benefits though. Since I've quit, I feel a lot calmer. My anxiety has gone way down, especially quitting energy drinks. But for me, a lot of the biggest things was like missing my son. I didn't realize how much I missed him until I had stopped blunting the pain of it or imagining that I was with marijuana. There's also a lot of chronic rent and financial pressure that I've been dealing with. So that's why you guys may have heard some tears come out on some past episodes. Plus, a lot of the stuff I talk about is deeply moving, at least to me, and I hope so for you. But it's been a particularly rough two months or so for me with all of those things that I mentioned. And there's a quote from Ajahn Chah, who is a forest monk who has a saying that if you haven't wept deeply, you haven't begun to meditate. And you shouldn't shy away from meditation, worry that you're going to cry more. It's actually a healthy process. I don't know if you guys have ever seen that movie Inside Out by Pixar. In my opinion, it is a triumph of a movie. It's got to be their best in the entire catalog. It's wonderful for not only kids, but also adults. It teaches us to look inside and stop trying to, Run away from sadness. You know, there's a moment when one of the main characters finally allows herself to feel sadness. And there's a quote at the end where she says, you know, and she's talking to her parents. She says, I know you don't want me to, but I miss home. I miss Minnesota. You need me to be happy, but I want my old friends and my hockey team. I want to go home. Please don't be mad. And the parents say, oh, sweetie. We're not mad. You know what? I miss Minnesota too. I miss the woods where we took hikes and the backyard where you used to play, the spring lake where you learned to skate. Come here. And they give her a hug. It's a wonderful film and The resolution is just being with your sadness when it's there. Sadness is not a bad thing. It's one of the first things that a lot of you may feel when you start to practice. And it's come and gone for me, like any mental storm that you experience. And it's really important to be with it. Jesus in the Beatitudes said, in the traditional translation, he says, "'Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.'" That translation is not bad, but it kind of flattens out some of the Aramaic nuance and rich, you know, multifaceted meanings of their language. So in Aramaic on that verse, the pronunciation, it sounds like, and means blessed, but in the deeper sense of inner harmony with divine presence. Meskani, if I said that right, is not just materially poor, but humble, empty, unclinging, ready to receive. And then bruk means in spirit, breath, essence, soul, inspiration. So one of the renderings that you can understand that as, as it would have been understood in the time of Jesus, and this is by Douglas Klotz, he says, happy and aligned with the one who Because a lot of words in Aramaic are both male and female. Kingdom, which we translated later in the 1600s, is very male-dominant. Another rendition from another poet is... "...flourishing are those empty of ego, whose breath is not clenched, for in their openness the kingdom breathes through them." And the second beatitude he talks about in the traditional translation is, "...blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted." And again, we get the pronunciation as, "...tubwaihun," for blessed, and then, "...lavelin," And if I say that right, that's rooted in the meaning of mourning, not just mourning as we understand it, but grieving deeply. Not just emotional pain, but like a sacred sorrow, a grief that opens the heart. And then... you know, for they shall be comforted means or implies being carried, held, gently restored to wholeness. And again, some of these are paraphrased renderings by Neil Douglas Klotz. He's written a lot of great books on the Aramaic Jesus, which has gotten lost through the millennia in translation. So for his work, rendering when we hear blessed are those who mourn for they shall be comforted another way to understand that is healed are those who weep for their frustrated desire they shall see the face of fulfillment in a new form or flourishing are the brokenhearted for their tears are already watering the roots of comfort and the third beatitude we remember as blessed are the meek And some people don't like that word meek. They think it sounds like weak or weakness, and it has nothing of the kind. The pronunciation of the Aramaic for that is You can hear how beautiful Aramaic is. And ruha is spirit or breath. And meekness in Aramaic, again, is not weakness. It's more gentleness, groundedness, or unassuming, like a humble strength rooted in God or the cosmos, not in self-promotion or the self. You see how this ties into letting go of the ego and the control, right? One of the renderings from Neil Douglas Klotz, again, is for this verse, "'Aligned with the one are the humble. Those submitted to God's will, they shall be gifted with the productivity of the earth.'" And one more translation of this could be understood as, "'Aligned are the soft-hearted, for the earth is not taken, but inherited by those who live in its rhythm.'" So you see this theme, poor in spirit, really more like emptiness, openness. Those who mourn, it's like a grief that kind of cracks open the heart and allows the light to enter. And the meek, you can understand as like an inner gentleness and surrender. It allows the spirit to breathe through you. And sometimes, you know, knowing these things doesn't make the storm any easier in life. You know, quitting these habits of mine, and for many of you listening who are in the process of quitting bad habits, it can bring up waves of restlessness and grief. And I experienced a lot of that. You know, when I recorded, I think it was episode five or six, that morning I was sobbing hysterically during my meditation. And when you meditate, it's like a form of digging reality. You take an active interest in what your breath feels like very specifically, what your body feels like very intricately. You're taking an interest in these little sensations that you normally don't even pay attention to. And then while you're doing that, things come up that were within you, in your soil. They start coming to the surface. And that day, It was just immense grief of missing my son and longing for him. And a lot of those things, I think, were sort of suppressed or buried deep down because I wasn't allowing them to surface like I should have been. And quitting cannabis has really helped me with that. There's also the challenge of receiving help. When you're in a shitstorm, excuse my language, a lot of people will come out of the woodwork to help you. And for me personally, I want to fix things by myself. I don't want to run from them. And it's hard for me to get help. I mentioned on another episode how the church had helped me pay rent one month. I've had friends that have helped me pay rent, family members more times than I am proud to admit. But they were there for me through all the pain that I've been through over these last couple of years. Payment, income loss, things like that. So when you learn to meditate, you're learning to sit with the discomfort that will arise in you and embrace it until the storm passes. I think it was in episode three, I talked about something similar where I was just so overwhelmed with the stress of paying rent that I woke up at like three in the financial, chronic financial stress that I had no idea how to get out of it. And our practice is really the root and the trunk of our tree that is us. Our mind is kind of at the top that waves and can snap off branches in the wind, to use Thich Nhat Hanh's example. I don't practice because I'm spiritual. I practiced because I was cracked open. Like I mentioned in episode one, I got to a point where I had a thought that it would be easier to not exist than exist. And at that point, I was cracked open. I'm like, what is this life about? These extreme hours, trying to be a good parent, but not being able to be there, feeling guilty when I am there, but balancing time with my kids and things, you know, resting and relaxing from my work hours. Everyone in the country is dealing with chronic financial stress. Prepping these episodes even can be a little stressful. I prep them in slivers of time throughout my day. You know, I'll be turning left, driving a manual transmission, and in the middle of a left turn, an idea pops on my head. And then when I straighten the car out, I'm switching back to the notepad app to jot the idea down. And then later, you know, with a little bit of free time I have at home trying to coalesce all these ideas into an outline and figuring out how I'm going to prep it and bring it to you guys. That's why for me, practice is not an option. It's a medicine. And I think that is true for all of us, but we're not taught to slow down and be still in this life. And I think that's why so many people, spiritual practice speaks to them But as I mentioned in other episodes, we've thrown the baby out with the bathwater a lot with the conceptions we have about religion and spirituality in general. On this notion of practice, I'll be starting a side series called Unpatterned. And it's going to be a space to be honest about our mental ruts, changes, and specifics on various practices like Vipassana or Zazen. Also, you know, breaking habits and the stories, the false stories that we inherit, you know, when we're younger, it's going to be a space for honest reflection on how we break these patterns, not by force, but by presence. But What keeps me upright in all this chaos is morning stillness. When I wake up, you know, I do my business, but I have a little area where I like to go sit. I have a cushion that I sit on. I have a picture of Jesus. I have a picture of Neem Karoli Baba, who to me represents a lot of Eastern philosophy and wisdom that I've received over these last three years that has in fact strengthened my, uh, my cosmology, the way I look at my life in the universe. I like to read a few verses from the Tao. I like listening to podcasts when I'm on the go from voices like Alan Watts, Ram Dass, You know, I like to reach out to my friends and tell them what I'm going through. I have one buddy of mine who's been really active in checking up on me, keeping me sane and going. And, you know, I like to check in on him, see how he's doing. You know, we are social creatures. We depend on each other. And it's good to remember that the universe didn't make a mistake when it made you, you know, you're part of this whole thing. Back to that, that Thich Nhat Hanh reference I mentioned, he has a saying about emotions as a storm and why we practice before the storm arrives. He says, one emotion is just one emotion. Emotions are impermanent. They come, they stay for some time, and they have to go. And we are much more than one emotion. During a storm, if you focus on the top of a tree, it seems very vulnerable. But if you look at the trunk, you see it as deeply rooted. We are like a tree. The brain is the top, and during the storm of emotion, we should not stay there, thinking and imagining. We bring our attention down to the navel. We breathe mindfully, and we feel safe. The emotion cannot do anything to us. There is only one thing to remember. An emotion is just an emotion, but we should not wait until we have a strong emotion to begin learning, because we will forget. That is why we have to begin the practice now. And after we have survived an emotion, we have a confidence in the practice. So it's important for us to take that time, guys, every day in the morning to be still, to inhabit your body, to feel what it's like just to be in your body, to just sit and And then you can carry that with you throughout your day. When you're walking, you're just walking. There's a poem from Rumi. I think it's called The Two Shops, but it has phrasing that's very similar to the name of this podcast. And he points out the two ways that you can live in this world. And I'm going to read it to you by Rumi. Don't run around this world looking for a hole to hide in. There are wild beasts in every cave. If you live with mice, the cat claws will find you. The only real rest comes when you're alone with God. Live in the nowhere that you come from, even though you have an address here. That's why you see things in two ways. Sometimes you look at a person and and see a cynical snake. Someone else sees a joyful lover and you're both right. Everyone is half and half. Like the black and white ox, Joseph looked ugly to his brothers and most handsome to his father. You have eyes that see from that nowhere and eyes that judge distances high and low. You own two shops and you run back and forth. Try to close the one that's a fearful trap, getting always smaller. Checkmate this way, checkmate that. Keep open the shop where you're not selling fish hooks anymore. You are the free swimming fish. Think that you're gliding out from the face of a cliff like an eagle. Think that you're walking like a tiger walks by himself in the forest. You're most handsome when you're after food. Spend less time with nightingales and peacocks. One is just a voice and the other is just a color. We've got to trust it. You know, there's a phrase in the Bible that says, are grapes gathered from thorns or figs from thistles? Which to me emphasizes that actions or fruits reveals the nature of the source or the tree. For example, apple trees bear apples and the universe bears people. You're not a mistake. You're the fruit of an intelligent process. And I'm paraphrasing Alan Watts on that, but he points out the fact that you didn't just show up randomly as a separate thing in this universe. It is all one whole. When you look at a tree, an apple tree, You don't see apples until the tree matures and grows and dives its roots deep into the ground, reaches towards the sky, and eventually produces apples. In the same way, you can't look at the earlier phases of the universe as unintelligent and that intelligence randomly came out of it. You can understand this intellectually and logically, but I encourage you to experience it as well through practice, experientially. When you quiet down and you stay with your breath and you bring your awareness to what is, over time, as you cultivate a continuity of mindfulness, you will start to instinctively and intuitively understand that you are not a separate thing. Distinct, maybe, yes, but part of a whole. These episodes that I create for you guys, they come to me best when I don't force them, when I trust them. And you'll hear some episodes where I'm trying a little too hard. You can hear my anxiety take over. I'm trying to control it too much. And I think the better ones have come when I've just relaxed. And oftentimes, they come right after an episode which I wasn't happy with. And I don't take the attitude of I give up, I don't care anymore, but I loosen my control. I say, okay, I tried too hard and now I'm going to let the next episode just flow out of me and hope for the best and trust in the process. You know, true creativity arises from surrender. And when you're trying to understand the universe and your place in it, I love that verse in Job chapter 38, verse four, where he says, this is God responding to Job and his friends who are trying to understand suffering. Where were you when I laid the foundation of the earth? Tell me if you have understanding. This highlights the limits of your egoic understanding. We can't cognitively understand the intelligence of the universe on our scale. on our wavelength, but we can trust it. We can see how it flows together logically, and then you can experience it in your practice. And letting go of egoic or intellectual understanding is not about shrinking. It's actually about resting in the vastness that already is, in a way, expanding our Jesus said it really well on the Sermon on the Mount when he said, "'Therefore I tell you, do not worry about your life, what you will eat, what you will drink, or about your body, what you will wear. Is not life more than food and the body more than clothing? Look at the birds of the air. They neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them.'" Are you not of more value than they? And which of you by worrying can add a single hour to your span of life? And why do you worry about clothing? Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow. They neither toil nor spin. And yet I tell you, even Solomon in all his glory was not clothed like one of these." But if God so clothes the grass of the field, which is alive today and tomorrow is thrown into the oven, will he not much more clothe you, you of little faith? Therefore do not worry, saying, what will we eat? What will we drink? What will we wear? For it is the Gentiles who seek all these things. And indeed, your heavenly Father knows that you need all these things. But seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as well. So do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will bring worries of its own. Today's trouble is enough for today. This harkens back to the Dalai Lama when he says, if you can fix a problem, wonderful, then there's no need to worry. And if you cannot, then there's no need to worry. There is never a time to worry. Like we talked about earlier, the ego wants control. It fears letting go. Useful tool, terrible master. And letting go is not a weakness or passivity. It's actually... precision. It's trust. You're flowing with things. It allows your mind to think more effectively, more efficiently. The mind and the intellect, it does have a place in life. It is a useful, you know, narrow troubleshooter and it's accomplished a lot of great things, but it works its best when you're not worried or trying to push it. Just let it do what it does. When you learn how to let go, everything clicks into place. From Chuang Tzu, when an archer is shooting for nothing, he has all his skill. If he shoots for a brass buckle, he is already nervous. If he shoots for a prize of gold, he goes blind. His skill has not changed, but the prize divides him. He cares. He thinks more of winning than of shooting and the need to win drains him of power. In the West, there's a lot of confusion on legalism and works when it comes to faith. There's a verse in James says, so faith by itself, if it has no works is dead. But you see, when I tell people in the West, some Western Christian friends of mine that I meditate, they try to tell me that that is a work. But see, that's inverted. Letting go, that is the work. Faith without works is dead. And the only work we can do is to let go and trust that the actions that come out of that letting go, out of that stillness, That we can trust. Those are the right actions. And they don't come from us. It's the wisdom of acting inside insecurity, out of your comfort zone, because you can trust the whole thing. You know that you're part of the whole thing. And these dark nights that we go through in life, they're not failure. They're not punishment. They're not just a depression. You know, it's like a sacred drying out where even the sweetness of God vanishes and all that remains is longing. It's not punishment, it's purification. From St. John, the author of Dark Night of the Soul, he says, "'To come to possess all, desire to possess nothing.'" who arrive at being all desire to be nothing. He says, in the evening of life, you will be examined in love. Love comes out of that stillness, out of that silence. Like I've told you guys in past episodes, when you're silent and present for your children, you're loving them. When you're completely present with cooking? They say you're cooking with love. Love and stillness are two sides of the same coin. God is love. Can you trust that still, silent, that loving awareness, that presence? Can you trust that if you are with the sensations of your body for longer and longer stretches of time, that everything will be okay and click exactly into place where it needs to? If you wake up at three in the morning like I do and can't get back to bed and your mind is blowing in the wind about bills coming up, can you come back to the sensation of your body resting in the bed at that moment and stay with that? It's a lot easier if you practice and that's why I recommend it. Sometimes we will cry, but if that's what we honestly feel, then we're in harmony with what is. Practice is necessary. The silence is trustworthy. Letting go is a strength. And you are not separate. You are already one with the whole. So don't worry. Let go. I'm going to close with a few words from Osho, but first, if something in this stirred you, even just a quiet yes, please come say hello. The link to our little community is in the description and every voice matters, especially yours. From Osho, he says, Don't seek Don't search Don't ask Don't knock Don't demand Relax If you relax, it comes If you relax, it is there If you relax, you start vibrating with it. Thank you for listening. Good night.
Music:This voice might fade like dust on the dial But I'm standing nowhere and I've been falling No headlines, no promises made Just a whisper that won't be afraid Standing nowhere and it feels like home No flags to wave, no need to roam Silence speaks louder than war ever could And I've never felt so understood The static is kind, it leaves me alone No orders to follow, no keys The sky's turning amber The clock's all reset And I haven't stopped walking just yet Standing nowhere Air wide and free No chains, no names The sky turns white, I'm still here, nothing to hide.