I would like to talk about silence. Not the silence that has no sounds, that requires utter absence of noise, but the silence that is there despite the noise, despite commotion. The inner silence.
The masters have been saying for hundreds of thousands of years, it is this silence that can not be put into words or expressed through them, and yet, I find it valuable to remind each other of exactly that silence, even if words can’t do it justice.
It is the silence that nature emanates, the silence that has a stillness at it´s heart, even in the eye of a storm.
Osho, the enlightened Indian Guru, spoke about the importance of active meditation for the people of the west. He often pointed out that the east is used to meditation, has integrated “silent sitting” into their culture for centuries and so has less difficulty to tame the mind, but the west has not and so would be highly challenged in those practices.
Hence he created meditations for the western mind. A mind that is busy, chattering, loud. A mind that acts up irritably when confronted with nothing, with silence, with sitting still. He endorsed the theory that the western mind has to go through catharsis and expression before being able to drop into silence.
This has been my experience too, on a personal as well as professional level. I have seen it in myself how the practice of emotional release is a doorway to a quality of silence that I could have hardly accessed within myself without it. I have seen the same phenomena in hundreds of people that had no way of finding peace within themselves with their minds pestering them in the empty moments.
Through active meditation, catharsis, processing, therapy and release techniques the mind seems to be more capable of surrendering to the silent space within, that for some reason otherwise feels merely threatening to it.
I have learned to love these processes that support silence to emerge as a consequence to them, rather then enduring an arduous, and often torturous, procedure of sitting through the attack of thoughts until the mind has exhausted itself.
Cultivating this inner silence, I believe, is the answer to the problems our society is facing right now.
A society where silence and inaction is daunting and skeptically deemed inefficient.
The incapacity to slow down, to rest in oneself, to enjoy the moment for what it is, to feel enough without having to do anything, is not just making us sick, but is destroying our environment.
How can we respect and appreciate our environment and the people in it if we can’t even respect and appreciate ourselves. Silence is the beginning.
And for silence to emerge, we do need to slow down, we do need to express what we repress, we do need to feel what we try not to feel, we do need to face what we are running from.
I could talk for hours about this need. Why the pressure and speed of our time is keeping us away from being here and now with ourselves and each other.
Most of us know and understand the necessity and the urgency of this, but it is time for us, as individuals and as a collective, to take the next step and implement it into our lives. Dare to “be the change that we want to see in the world” as Gandhi said.
Change starts with us, and finding silence within ourselves is paramount to that change.
I know that it sometimes feels impossible and counter intuitive to many of us to step away from habitual business, to authentically expose who we are and how we are, to say no to distraction and yes to introspection, but I also know that this is what is going to bring about change. One step at a time, one person at a time.
More silence means more peace, more peace means more love, more love means a better world.
Let’s start with more silence, the rest will follow.
With Love, Kanika Frings _ kanikafrings.com / dimamallorca.com
