Tag Archives: silence

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Breathing in the quiet. 

Quiet is something I need, something I crave, and something I love. I know this about myself – and yet sometimes I find it difficult to sit in silence. To breathe in the quiet. My mind sometimes seems to think it needs to be entertained – even when my soul is saying shhhhhhhh just sit in silence. 

During times of anxiety I fight this inner battle even more. It’s a time when I really need quiet. A time when meditating and walking or riding out in nature really are the medicine I need. But, my mind instead says no, you should watch tv or play on the Internet or waste hours on Facebook. 

Its like my mind resists the thing that will help it most. I don’t understand this, but I know it to be true. So I try and remember to work with that. 

I’ve been meditating for a couple of years and it has brought great benefits to my life. When we moved home in all the chaos and the emotional upset I stopped. Even though it was a time when I needed it most. I couldn’t handle sitting in silence and hearing what was going on in my head. Even though meditation was what I needed to calm those voices of sadness and worry, I couldn’t break through the barrier. 

I’ve been meditating again and I feel so much better. I appreciate the silence I can sit in it again and breathe. I can feel it healing me. 

Last night as I was walking home I had to stop and listen. I was listening to nothing. We live near the highway and as the city grows the road gets busier and louder. Moments of true silence are harder and harder to come by here. Ironically, my moment of quiet here came because the highway was so busy it had come to a complete standstill – therefore no noise. 

This afternoon out on my cousin’s deck I noticed it again. A few of us were standing out there visiting – and we could hear each other. The road was quiet. We stood and watched child cousins play while us adult cousins visited. Saw the kids run through the field playing hide and go seek while we caught up on each other’s lives. My happiness moment. My sister was not with us, but I got to see her girl play with my girl and that was great. 

Yesterday I talked about how what I think about I attract – or what I believe I achieve. Specifically how I learned the Law of Attraction while riding I just wasn’t aware of what it was. No sooner had I published my blog than my niece and daughter called me to see I wanted to go riding with them. Of course I dropped everything and ran (skipped) out to the barn. I got to give an impromptu riding lesson to Jacob where I ended up explaining the law of attraction horse style just as I learned it. What you think about you attract.  It’s a fact. 

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The sound of silence. 

Today has been a feel gross day. I’m not sure if I’m sick or if I am just feeling like emotional crap. Either way, the result is the same. Blah. Actually, I’m hoping it’s the result of some emotional junk moving through me from my energy work and my yoga. I’ve started a new session of Healing Light Yoga Therapy, which is restorative yoga and is the most wonderful thing for my soul. But it often gives me some yuck along the way. 

So, I’m dealing with the aftermath of my phone in the toilet. If bad things come in threes, I had it last night with the skunk, the phone, and the barfing kid. I have a good warrantee though and for a couple of hundred dollars, by tomorrow or Wednesday I’ll have a new one. But, for now I live in silence. 

I have discovered that the level of silence I can tolerate is directly related to my level of anxiety. The higher the anxiety the less I can handle total silence.  No noise means having to listen to the small voices that are telling me I’m stuck in a bad place. Since moving home, my anxiety is so much less I barely even think about it. But, I discovered today that I’ve still been filling more silence gaps than I realized. I’ve been doing this by either messing around on the Internet or using music to fill the quiet. 

On the way into town this morning,  Jacob and I were half way in before we realized the car radio was off. When we did, we both commented on how nice it was to enjoy the quiet, appreciate the scenery, and relax into the silence. The sound of silence is a beautiful thing. It’s also where all my big thoughts happen and my profound emotions come from. My moment of happiness today was that drive into town with Jacob. 

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Listening for my honeypots

After ranting away here earlier, I did a bit of reading this morning from the book The Tao of Pooh which I have read years ago and kind of fell back into. Winnie The Pooh described perfectly my feelings about needing some silence so I can come back into myself.

“The fact is,” said Rabbit, “We’ve missed our way somehow.”

They were having a rest in a small sand-pit on the top of the Forest. Pooh was getting rather tired of the sand-pit, and suspected it of following them about, because whichever direction they started in, they always ended up at it, and each time, as it came through the mist at then, Rabbit said triumphantly, ‘Now I know where we are!” and Pooh said sadly, “So do I,” and Piglet said nothing. He had tried to think of something to say, but the only thing he could think of was, “Help, help!” and it seemed silly to say that, when he had Pooh and Rabbit with him.

“Well,” said Rabbit, after a long silence in which nobody thanked him for the nice walk they were having, “we’d better get on, I suppose. Which way shall we try?”

“How would it be,” said Pooh slowly, “if as soon as we’re out of sight of this Pit, we try to find it again?”

“What’s the good of that?” asked Rabbit.

“Well,” said Pooh, “we keep looking for Home and not finding it, so I thought if we looked for this Pit, we’d be sure not to find it, which would be a Good Thing, because then we might find something that we weren’t looking for, which might be just what we were looking for, really.”

“I don’t see much sense in that,” said Rabbit…

“If I walked away from this Pit, and then walked back to it, of course I should find it.”

“Well, I just thought perhaps you wouldn’t,” said Pooh. “I just thought.”

“Try,” said Piglet suddenly. “We’ll wait here for you.”

Rabbit gave a laugh to show how silly Piglet was, and walked into the mist. After he had gone a hundred yards, he turned and walked back again… and after Pooh and Piglet had waited twenty minutes for him, Pooh got up.

“I just thought,” said Pooh. “Now then, Piglet, let’s go home.”

“But Pooh,” cried Piglet all excited, “do you know the way?”

“No,” said Pooh. “But there are twelve pots of honey in my cupboard, and they’ve been calling to me for hours. I couldn’t hear them properly before, because Rabbit would talk, but if nobody says anything except those twelve pots, I think, Piglet, I shall know where they’re calling from. Come on.”

They walked off together; and for a long time Piglet said nothing, so as not to interrupt the pots; and then suddenly he made a squeaky noise… and an oo-noise… because now he began to know where he was; but he still didn’t dare to say so out loud, in case he wasn’t. And just when he was getting so sure of himself that it didn’t matter whether the pots went on calling or not, there was a shout in front of them, and out of the mist came Christopher Robin. 

(The Tao of Pooh, pp12-14)

Something I have truly learned for myself on my journey is that I can’t hear anything of any great importance unless I have allowed myself to settle into silence. It’s when my body, mind and soul are relaxed and quiet that I truly can truly hear and absorb what is important. If there is nonstop noise be it another person, the TV, or music I can’t settle into silence.

When I first started meditating and trying to embrace silence I found it really difficult. Then I had to listen to all the garbage that was running in my head and I had to figure out what to do with that. So, I understand why some people fill empty space with nonstop noise. However the new me has learned to not only embrace, but crave that time of stillness.

If I don’t have quiet I can’t hear my honeypots calling me so I know which direction to go.

By no means do I want or need quiet all day long, but this time of the morning seems to be an important one for me for setting up my day.

That being said, I took my Dotted Dog out a bit later and we did go for our walk. It was wonderful.

The happiest dog in the world:

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The beautiful scenery I enjoy on my walk:

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This is my favourite tree. It kind of looks like he’s dipping his toes in the water

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I am so thankful that I did manage to get out and enjoy this beauty. It DID in fact set me up for a wonderful day and I am incredibly thankful for that.

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Meditation noises

I was watching a really bad show yesterday. I’m almost ashamed to admit it it was so bad. I knew it was not my type of show and yet kept watching it anyway. It was Garfunkel and Oats – which may be some people’s cup of tea, but as I was watching it all I could think was “they cancelled The Crazy Ones yet decided this was acceptable, entertaining tv?” Yet I kept watching. In my defense I was folding laundry and had very little going on in the brain activity department at the time.

At some point in the show the two main characters decided to meditate. As they sat there you got a little glimpse into the horrors that were going on inside their brains. After a couple of minutes they both opened their eyes and looked at each other and said something like ‘meditating is terrible, it brings up all the truths about ourselves that we we try to hide from by watching tv’.

and I was like OMG, that is so true. In fact I was probably doing it right then. I could have had a quiet meditative moment, or listened to some relaxing music (Deval Primal makes my spirit sing), but instead I decided to drown whatever thoughts I had running in my brain with tv. Now, I’m not saying that all the noises that my brain need to be listened to. Nor is the purpose of meditation to listen to those noises. But sometimes when I’m meditating, these little irritating truths that I’ve been trying to hide from surface and I have to deal with them. Things that I didn’t know or thought I’d been able to hide from myself (ha!) come raging out into the open when I sit in my silence connecting to the Source. Sometimes I don’t want to. But I do have to say that my life has become better since I’ve been meditating. Since I’ve been able to learn how to sit in stillness. Since the quiet in my brain isn’t as scary as it used to be.

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