There are moments in our lives when everything we’ve used to anchor ourselves, our roles, our beliefs, and our strategies for making sense of the world fail to hold us. We come undone not just in the face of external events, but in the quiet recognition that life will never be what we thought it was. In these moments, when certainty falls away, we are invited into what poet T.S. Eliot called the “still point of the turning world.”

The still point is not a place of escape. It is not passivity or numbness. It is a threshold and a sacred center within the chaos, where movement and stillness meet. In the disorientation of grief, transition, betrayal, or collective despair, this still point offers no solution, but it does offer presence. And sometimes, that is the beginning of healing.

As a somatic psychotherapist, I often meet people who arrive at this edge. They bring the ache of being blown off course whether by death, illness, heartbreak, or the crumbling of belief systems they once held dear. So many of us carry a contradiction: the child within still hoping for safety, and the adult beginning to see that life is unpredictable, and sometimes unkind. In that contradiction, uncertainty arises. And with it, the need for a deeper grounding.

This is where the body leads. When the mind can’t make sense of things, the body remembers how to breathe. It remembers how to walk the labyrinth stone by stone, breath by breath until one finds the center. My own labyrinth, marked by stones and crowned by fire or water, teaches this rhythm: inward, outward, return. There is wisdom in the spiral. It knows that healing is not linear. It invites us to pause.

T.S. Eliot wrote, “At the still point, there the dance is.” What if we are meant to meet uncertainty not with frantic answers but with reverent stillness? What if the discomfort of not knowing is not a flaw in our design, but a door to deeper communion with ourselves, with the Mystery, with the invisible rhythm that holds us all?

I remember a time when I did not know where I would live, having little money, having left a marriage and job, with my sons off on their own. I too felt alone and uncertain about my next month, let alone my next chapter. I found my way to the quiet spot in the garden behind the church I attended. It was here, as when I was a child who lived next door to the church my father led as priest, that I turned. In the stillness of uncertainty, I turned once again to God, not out of terror, but as a child to her father, wanting to curl up in his lap and feel his breathing, know his warmth. It was not words I longed for or immediate direction, but the lap that held me, the breath that told me he was alive, the memory of a steady presence that comforted me.

This is still true today. My father is turning 98 this month and remains a presence of comfort in the storms of uncertainty. He points the way to God, to an abiding presence, not the certainty of predictable safety, but to the still point of knowing that faith tells us not of “knowing,” but of “being known.” And in this gift, we can settle into the lap of Divine Love that transcends fear and uncertainty. I am lucky to know this through my relationship with my father.

Like poet Emmett Wheatfall writes in Contradictions from an Uncertain Silence, silence is not the absence of meaning, instead it is its crucible. It is the place where our contradictions rise up, where the childhood longing for comfort meets the adult need for courage. In that silence, a new voice may form. Not the voice of certainty, but the voice of presence. Of compassion. Of a deeper kind of knowing.

Stillness is not the end of the dance. It is the place from which the dance begins.