Heading into the longest night of the year, I’d like to invite you to enjoy the silence of the season.
You might ask, with the typical preparations and festivities lined up this month, how is this a season of silence?
A season can be anyway we create it to be. Even with many commitments we can carve out time for stillness and silence. The rewards are more groundedness, peace, clarity, open-heartedness. Silence is necessary like water and oxygen; it is healing for our brain and our body. It can help us break the habit of unproductive busyness and distraction. If to our silence we add prayer and the intention of communion with God, we will be fortified in our innermost being.
If one doesn’t need strengthening, clarity, peace of mind, rest of body – then silence is of no use. I need all these and the more that comes with resting in God’s Presence. I don’t need a meaningful epiphany so much as to know I’m being held lovingly by Life. By ‘know’ I mean somatically experience the truth of existence.
Have you felt the difference between hearing and reading the same bit of information? Unlike visual content, sound is penetrating – sound is more like taste than like touch. Everything we hear vibrates down into our being and gets registered. Sound can be soothing, disturbing, or neutral, like muzak. Our nervous system reacts to what we hear. Our nervous system relaxes when we receive silence.
The recovery we gain through learning and practice is related to the stress or lack thereof in our system. Survival mode and personal development mode are incompatible. If one is under survival stress, personal growth is delayed.
In the Big Red Book, Appendix A, the most immediate solution to the developmental effects of trauma is to destress our body. This is why we choose embodiment practices like yoga, tai chi, qigong, dance, walks in nature.
A shortcut to treating the stressed body is to nourish oneself with silence. Immersing ourselves in a silent environment can accelerate the gifts of embodiment, mindfulness, or contemplative practices. And unlike practices that are goal oriented, silence is a solution that only requires a decision. We are not ‘trying to achieve’ anything. Nothing is asked of us other than to turn down the noise and let silence work its way through us.
If we find silence uncomfortable, this is an excellent piece of information. Nature sounds or other white noise can be a starting point. I personally like the sound of thunder and rain, or birdsong, or crackling fire, or snowstorm with howling winds – the sound of ocean waves crashing on the shore. I find all these sounds more soothing than a podcast (as much as I enjoy a good podcast!)
If you’d like to avoid entering silence right this minute, read more about its benefits here. Meanwhile, blessings to you this holiday season and may we all be nourished spiritually as well as merrymake.
Thank you for reading and for your presence and practice.
Thank you Simone - a beautiful sharing from the heart. Reading it gave me such a felt sense of peace. Wishing you a blessed & silent evening . . .