Sitting in silence can you hear your inner motor? I’m not talking about your heartbeat or the hum in your ears. I’m talking about the silence? What does the silence sound like?
I know my silence has changed over time.
I was a bouncing ball moving from one thought to another, reacting and refocusing over and over again.
Other times, my thoughts are gentle and reflective observations that I don’t feel attached to.
Then, of course, there are times beyond the monkey mind when the train has left the track and it’s speeding attaching one fearful thought on top of another.
Occasionally I have the profound experience of nothing but peace and emptiness where I’m floating.
The more I practice silence the more patient I am with myself in silence. The more I practice silence the more willing I am to listen to my quiet inside voice. The more I practice silence the more patient I am outside myself when I listen.
There are times we experience silence together. We watch each other in our Zoom experience.
We’re all breathing together. We are in silence together. We are being together.
I believe when we sit in silence, we honorably bless ourselves. There is truth among us. A truth that can’t be defined by words. A presence that is greater than we can imagine. A presence that runs our inner motors.
In our silence, we listen and wait to hear truth. I recognize truth when I feel goosebumps. I recognize truth when my heart is full. I recognize truth when tears spontaneously fill my eyes. I recognize truth by knowing.
Truth has no time. A lifetime can change by the flash of truth.
Our silence honors our thoughts. We deserve to be heard. Our silence demonstrates self-care. We deserve to be loved. Our silence demonstrates our self-worth. We deserve to be held. Our silence hears our story. We deserve to be believed. We deserve love.
We demonstrate that by sitting with ourselves and honoring our silence. It is a gift and a doorway to peace.
By William Stafford, from Stories That Could Be True
Some time when the river is ice ask me mistakes I have made. Ask me whether what I have done is my life. Others have come in their slow way into my thought, and some have tried to help or to hurt: ask me what difference their strongest love or hate has made.
I will listen to what you say. You and I can turn and look at the silent river and wait. We know the current is there, hidden; and there are comings and goings from miles away that hold the stillness exactly before us. What the river says, that is what I say.
Participants’ Reflections:
Thank you so much. It’s about the only response anyone can have in this crazy time. Silence. It’s a great reminder to be aware of that because it’s so easy to get into fear and go off the rails. Just by taking a breath and sitting in silence and reminding oneself that that is what matters. To stay focused on myself and support my friends.
Thank you. My experience today during the meditation with the silence was a motion, I felt this motion. It was going forward, steady, almost like my breath and my heartbeat. Like the waterwheel mentioned in a meditation (see Nov 5 blog). When it was the waterwheel, it was like dumping water on me. Then I had this feeling of really light, whimsical dancing where my hands were up towards the light and they would come down gradually. So instead of that steady going down, it was light and airy. It was most pleasant during the whole time.
What I took from that in part is we all want to be heard, held, and loved. I’m trying to figure out how we can understand those who seem very different from us. They probably want the same things, and how do we move forward in this terrible time. Recognizing it’s probably what everyone wants and needs even though we may not be in touch with it.
Everyone of us has an innocent child in us who wants to be loved, held, and heard.
Thank you. One of the things I sifted through during the meditation was the concept of love. I was brought up to believe that love is an emotion. I am starting to shift with curiosity to sense that love is much more tangible than just an emotion. I heard recently that love is the absence of separation from me and you. I am contemplating what that might mean. During the meditation, I was moved to open my eyes and hold each of you and really try to take in on a physical level what it felt like that we were doing together at the same time and that we are all connected. There is not a separation.
Yesterday, for a moment, I pictured my feet in heavy old boots with huge black chains on them. To me, it signifies how I feel. So heavy, I can’t get out of everything that is so difficult. Somehow miracles push us forward. Yesterday, I was having a terrible time with fear and anxiety and feeling I am not enough. I haven’t done enough; I can’t do enough. Nothing feels safe; Covid feels terrible; I have health issues; environmental issues. Today, I was picturing I was leaning up against an old beautiful beech tree. It had all these birds in it, all talking in a big convention. I didn’t want any animals to hurt themselves trying to chew off my big chains, so I projected love to all the animals, the deer, the racoons, a coyote. I don’t think it was my feet falling asleep, but at the end, my feet felt a little warmth and buzzing.
Let’s believe it was what you experienced. I have images of your meditation. Thank you for the visual. It’s great.
Thank you. What came to my mind in the meditation was ‘be still and know.’ And that is silence. Then I thought about something I read last night, that we are not our bodies and we are not our minds. This article was saying, in our lifetime, we will eat around 35 tons of food. It’s comforting to know we are not our bodies and we are not our minds. Then I thought about what someone said in a recent meditation (see Jan 10 blog) ‘we are the horizon and we are the silence.’ From our silence, so many miraculous things happen. I’m about to take a class on Virginia Woolf. Her stream of consciousness writing is often hard to follow, but when I read some of her autobiographical stuff, I so relate to it. She expresses so much. It’s so good we live in a time when we can read things that people wrote before television and social media. Her silence at times wound up as mental illness. It feels to me that even in her mental illness, she gave us such a gift. The gift that we all have periods of feeling mentally ill. Sometimes in those silences and in those places where we feel most disturbed, when we come out of it, we feel like giants coming out of a hole. All of that takes place against the backdrop of silence. We are silence.
When we think we convert all that food to energy/heat, a calorie is a unit that is used to measure energy. We are silence. We are Energy.
I heard a quote that love is really an element, like air and water. The concept of that is a lot to think about.
Thank you for your willingness to continue on this journey. Just as we sit in silence, it holds such communication but there are no words. It holds togetherness and we are alone. It’s amazing. Thank you for honoring your silence and being with us in unity in silence. It’s a wonderful and powerful thing. I hope you all have a gentle day.
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