Silence, Patience and Grace-Preventative Medicine for the Soul #2
Last week I prescribed slowing down as a practice to tune into yourself and to nourish your soul, and as a way to become aware of when you are going into overwhelm before you actual ARE overwhelmed. I hope you experimented with slowing down. This week we are going a little deeper into "prescription #2":
Spending Time In Silence
This doesn't mean to stop the slowing down practice, please continue that, experiment with slowing down while you are doing your day to day activities, just do them more slowly and intentionally and see what shifts for you, and even the energy around you as it comes to meet you where you are, rather than you rushing to meet the swirl of energy around you.
Now, in addition to that I am asking you to spend some time in silence and stillness. Not much, start out with 10 minutes a day in the morning before you consume any "external" information. I know as I get older I crave more silence, more time to be with myself and my thoughts. Spending time in silence does NOT have to mean "clearing all thoughts out of your mind." This idea is often why people give up on their meditation practices and go back to rushing through their daily lives with no idea what their heart and soul has to say. They lose patience with themselves, they beat themselves up for "not being able to meditate" and the whole thing becomes counter-productive. I would love to hear about your past experiences with meditating.
Are their people who can totally "clear out"..of course, but like anything else that takes practice, patience and grace, and they all started with the "monkey-mind" but they just kept going, because the quietude and the break from the external world nourishes our souls, regardless of what our mind is doing. Because the truth is our Minds are a part of overall being, our mind and our souls are intertwined and there is a lot of value in sitting in silence with no external noise, to just compassionately witness and listen to your own thoughts, not someone or something else's. St. Teresa of Avila had a wonderful take on this (excerpt from Interior Castles). And the more you do this, the more you are able to discern your own inner voice and inner wisdom even when the outside world is a barrage of noise and information.
"Can we stop the stars from hurtling across the heavens? No. We cannot stop the mind either. Off it goes and then we send the faculties after it.....But it could be that the soul is fully present with him in the innermost chamber while the mind stays on the periphery of the palace, grappling with a thousand wild and dangerous creatures and gaining real merit from this kind of struggle."
So get curious with what thoughts you think when you are in your own palace. And have patience with yourself, love yourself, witness yourself and know that it is absolutely OK if it's like a three-ring circus in there with a very loud emcee and you are trying to watch what is going on in all three-rings at once. That is how my mind tends to work. There are monkeys, squirrels, and elephants full of memories. And ALL of it is Wisdom. Even the shadowy, angry, judgmental thoughts. And so I have grace with myself. And the grace is knowing they are my thoughts not someone else's.
Also, get curious with "how you think" as it is also a clue to your strong intuitive faculties. Do you think in pictures, do you hear your inner voice whispering, do you travel around your body in your mind, or get uncomfortable and fidgety? Do you think about the to-do list or do a lot of memories come up? Do you review certain situations or experiences over and over again in your mind? It is ALL good, and usually it is all of the above. I encourage you to spend another 5 minutes journaling after you are complete, and so over time you are aware of what you focus on and where your energy goes. Because ultimately, we will look at that, and if your energy is going to things that are not in your joy, or that nourishes your soul we will work with practices to shift that. But first you have to be aware of where you are, and where your mind spends most of its time.
This silence has become so sweet for me, it's like a nectar. Because even though MOST of what I consume from the outside world is soul nourishing it is still outside of my heart flame palace. And even though I treat almost every act and action as sacred it is still action. And so when I say silence, I really mean it. Not guided visualizations, not sound healing music or mantra, not yoga practice, not praying, journalling, art making for healing, or any of the other things that also feed our souls...do those too please. I mean nothing except the sound of your breath and the birds singing. (or dogs barking...you will learn to go deeper even when you hear those jarring sounds)
So I invite you to experiment this week with 10 minutes of silence in the morning. For me, this is always the more difficult one but also the one where I get to "witness" a lot of activity because there is thoughts and excitement for the day ahead. So I also have a longer extended evening practice, where I do often start out with prayer, gratitude, 10 minutes of mantra and/or sound healing music, and then at least 10 minutes of total silence. Those "thoughts" tend to be different in nature and quality as I prepare for sleep and I am relaxed more at night, (I am not one to think about the next day's to-do list before I go to bed) instead I also say to myself. "Thank you, you did enough today, I love you." So my thoughts at night are often when I get the intuitive nuggets, memories both positive and not that are calling to be worked with in some way. And then often do get "worked out" in the dream state and then I awaken with "information".
So do choose silence once or twice a day, and please let me know how it felt and what you discovered about yourself. I promise you won't regret taking this time with your inner palace.
Love and Light,
Dina
To read last week's prescription Slow Down and Tune In. Go here. To watch a video where I shared deeper wisdom and practices for slowing down, go here.