About

I live in northern Finland with my wife, two daughters and a rascal of a dog. The winters here are dark for months and the sea freezes over. By any ordinary measure my life is abundant and in balance, and for a long time that was the problem: everything was right, and something still was not.

As a child I was quiet, sensitive and introverted, and I wrote stories that no one was allowed to read. Then I learned to play by the rules. I became good at the game of success, at knowing what was expected of me. Deep down I was still that quiet child, and neglecting him produced a conflict I did not notice for years, because my mind was never silent long enough for me to hear it. Most of us walk through life like this, carrying personal stories, inner conflicts and a silent suffering we do not even recognise as suffering.

In my mid-thirties something began to shift, gradually and without my doing. The conflict dissolved. Nothing was wrong any more. The centre of my life moved from doing to being, and, unsettlingly for someone who had built everything on thinking, it unfolded in the absence of analytical thought. The intellect I had cherished turned out to be arrogance in disguise.

One day I wrote a few pages about what had happened, for myself, the way I had as a child. Those pages became a book, and the book became seven. Some of them echo Zen or Buddhism; the echoes are unintended. I do not belong to a tradition and I do not teach a method. I only point.

What I point at is this: awakening is not becoming someone extraordinary. It is becoming wholly ordinary, more ordinary than the many who are trying to become special. Profound peace lives in the ordinary because it is an expression of who you already are. There is no need to withdraw into special states. This ordinary life, this very moment, is the practice.

I write because I believe inner peace is your birthright, and that modern life does not hand it to you. Not balance in your circumstances, but a life without the constant strain of compulsive thinking. If any of these words return a little of that to you, that is more than enough.

If you would like to begin, start with The Sound of the Bells: a story, and the shortest way into everything else I have written.

Jussi Niittyviita
Kuivaniemi, Finland