Wednesday, June 23, 2010

Silence is Deafening

It's an expression I have often loved. Your silence is deafening, meaning why aren't you saying anything? But for me, silence is hard. It means I'm alone with my deepest feelings and thoughts. It means I don't have something else to distract me from me. It's scary. Or at least it used to be.

I've been reading alot lately. I finally finished Eat Pray Love by Liz Gilbert. I'd been reading it and trying to finish it since January and figured I better tackle it before the Julia Roberts movie comes out! It's been inspiring. The ex and I attended a meditation class awhile back. We befriended a fabulous monk that I still enjoy keeping in touch with. He has, and continues to, teach me alot, not just about meditation but life in general. I've started to meditate again. It's amazing the serenity you can find in being still. It's astonishing to me that healing can happen when you do absolutely nothing at all. I'm also about halfway through Women Food and God by Geneen Roth. It's been extremely helpful too and guess what? She suggests meditating too! I think it was Oprah that said all the great minds meditate. I don't know about great minds but I do know that it's a peacefulness that I can't get by trying to figure everything out on my own.

There have been times in my life when I thought sadness would overtake me, so I pushed it away and pushed on. There have been times that I have been so angry at someone for not loving me like they promised to, that I shoved it down inside. I am feeling those feelings now and it's not as excruciating as I thought, not even close, and boy, am I human! And I finally think that's okay. Turns out those feelings are feelings from days gone by and current events only trigger those bad memories from the past. Thus, the feelings are not actually happening "now" but were never validated feelings that keep coming up. If I had had someone to acknowledge those feelings then, I likely wouldn't be so tormented. But I have the opportunity now, in meditation, to call all of those unresolved, unvalidated feelings to the surface and feel them... then let them go... If someone would have told me it was that simple I would have laughed them off.

And so I meditate, out at the lake, in silence, with Lola the wonderdog by my side.

Lola is meditating too. She looks happy!

2 comments:

  1. That was a nice read. Searching deafening silence brought me here :)
    Ive recently started meditation along with tyring in general to be more present (Eckhart Toole style). Was very closed to this kind of stuff before I started to become aware of how destructive my thoughts can be, couple years agoish via CBT (feeling good the new mood therapy). Its amazing the power a thought can have over you if you let it eh.
    Anyways, this noobie has found focusing on the silence when meditating to be very doable. The thoughts come, your aware of them, then let them go. Whooosh comes the silence, almost in waves if i could describe it like that. It certainly can be deafening but its a comfortable peaceful place to be. Could almost say the more deafening the silence is, the more free of thought I am, its almost like a measure lack of thought lol.
    All the best
    D

    ReplyDelete
  2. That was a nice read. Searching deafening silence brought me here :)
    Ive recently started meditation along with tyring in general to be more present (Eckhart Toole style). Was very closed to this kind of stuff before I started to become aware of how destructive my thoughts can be, couple years agoish via CBT (feeling good the new mood therapy). Its amazing the power a thought can have over you if you let it eh.
    Anyways, this noobie has found focusing on the silence when meditating to be very doable. The thoughts come, your aware of them, then let them go. Whooosh comes the silence, almost in waves if i could describe it like that. It certainly can be deafening but its a comfortable peaceful place to be. Could almost say the more deafening the silence is, the more free of thought I am, its almost like a measure lack of thought lol.
    All the best
    D

    ReplyDelete