The Sound of Silence

Be completely silent, quiet the chatter in your mind… Can you hear it?

That is what silence, stillness sounds like…

If you’re not used to silence the mind, you will probably go straight to identifying the sounds around you, the passing cars, the sound of other people talking, the hum of the computer, the fridge, the sound of birds maybe, your kids, your animals…whatever is part of your surroundings.

Try not to judge or identify, just accept them and listen inward..

I remember when I first started doing this, what I heard in my mind was a slight buzzing sound.

It was weird, but my silence, my stillness had a sound.

Incredibly fascinating!

I never really felt heard as a kid growing up.

I could talk and talk, loudly or quietly, I still felt like nobody really heard me.

People around me, parents, relatives, friends, they talked, shouted, interrupted…and nobody really listened…nobody really got what anybody said.

I’m sure a lot of kids grow up feeling the same way.

It’s actually not that long ago that I understood the root of all this:

We will never be heard as long as we keep talking – to be heard we have to start listening.

And it all begins and ends with oneself.

I learned this by the art of meditation – by listening inward, paying attention to what’s going on inside. And now, these days, chatter, discussions, interruptions, shouting – it actually hurts listening to it.

But it’s everywhere, wherever people come together this happens.

People are so afraid of not being heard, of not getting their points across, that they shout, they yell, they interrupt, one talk louder than the other. And nobody is really heard. Because nobody can listen when they talk. And you can’t be heard as long as you talk when other people talk – it’s really that simple.

So much changed with meditation.

It was as if I quiet down everything – I turned down the volume of the world!

Learning to listen inward, I learned to listen and pay attention outward.

We’re surrounded by chatter and noise every day – sound everywhere.

And everything is so focused on the outside world and the constant attempts to drown out these outside sounds enhances that focus and the feeling of not being heard.

It creates stress, a feeling of insignificance, feeling of being in a constant competition, and, like Eckhart Tolle says “You lose yourself in the world.”

So, by meditating, by beginning to listen inward, we begin to listen outward.

We quiet our own minds, and turn down the volume of the world.

And we understand this simple thing: that in order to be heard, we must first learn to listen.

So simple, yet…sometimes so difficult to practice.

I have this one thing I always do:

Whenever I watch a show on TV, in every commercial break I turn off the sound, close my eyes, and I check in on my breathing.

These commercial breaks which used to be so immensely annoying to me before, works like a mindfulness bell for me now.

It’s little exercises in mindfulness.

And keeping this up – steady meditation every day and checking in with my breathing regularly -  over a period of a few weeks I start to notice how I calm down, how the level of stress reduces, how much more patient I become, and it even increases my energy level.

But for me, to get to this level, I had to get through this weird phase – actually listening to the stillness and that strange humming or buzzing sound of it.

Or maybe it wasn’t there at all?

Maybe it was just me being so conditioned to expect sound or noise everywhere and in everything and label it, actually label everything, that the stillness appeared to have a sound??

I don’t know.

I’m sure we all develop our coping mechanisms to stay sane in an insane world – mindfulness and meditation practice is mine. Even if it comes with a buzz.

Do you experience anything similar in your silent moments?

With Love

Melissa Blue