Shared silence
I believe, this is something we all need
Could you sit down and stay silent for 5 minutes?
Not do anything, no phone, no computer, not even music? Just sitting with yourself, in silence.
This is something that is very difficult for many people. I used to think that I cannot meditate, because in my mind, meditation meant to sit silently, not move and have an empty head.
I couldn’t have been farther from the truth. By now I manage to meditate regularly and get into a meditative state in many different scenarios of life.
Through years of mantra meditation, I also finally managed to get into silent meditation. You know, the sitting in silence and not moving part ;).
But I will not get into the details of meditation now, what it is, what it is not etc… I would like to put the focus for today s newsletter on the action of silence.
I have been craving silence since quite a while. The world and society seem to noisy to me, too much stress, turmoil, words, sounds, disturbances & mess all around everywhere.
And I notice it even more, because I work from home, alone and then it becomes even more noticeable when I am outside of my place.
I mostly see people walking around with earphones plugged into their ears, music blasting their brains, or being glued to their phones, even in company, or talking for the sake of taking, even though it passes the person they talk to.
We are deeply disconnected from ourselves and others these days and while one reason is surely all the technology & tools we get bombarded with, I still think we can all choose with our free will & decide against all of these. At least in certain situations.
Because constant overstimulation is making us sick, disconnected, stressed, burned out & completely out of balance. It also isolates us.
And what we need these days is: connection, togetherness & support.
But then also: we can’t connect to others if we are disconnected from ourselves. And how do we connect to ourselves?
By being with ourselves, alone. Without music, phones, entertainment… you get the gist ;), the circle is closing.
Here is the thing though: it can be scary. Because what if suddenly these intrusive thoughts come up, that you hate your job! That you are unhappy in your relationship! That you want to move… they can become unbearable, depending on how long you have decided to ignore them & distract yourself from them.
So ideally, we take regular mini-time outs throughout our days and weeks to reconnect to ourselves and potentially course correct. This takes a while to get used to, but the second you get into it, you will feel a big difference.
The other option is, to be silent together. With others.
This is something I started last week: a shared silent session in the town I live in, for one hour sitting together and just being.
We were three people, one friend that I knew would join and a complete stranger! A lady that got to know about it & decided to join us!
You know how happy I got when I saw her approaching us & sitting next to us on a bench? My heart exploded out of love for her, because it was just so amazing that she came, She stayed the whole hour and loved it! And she said she felt the love I sent to her as well! (because this is how the universe works, just saying ;) ).
It was a beautiful experience and tomorrow will be the second session. I made an arrow to put next to the sign I did, to indicate where we sit & who knows how many will show up tomorrow!
If you are in Umeå, feel free to join us, we will sit at the big bird in the central part in town, from 12:00 - 13:00. And if you are not from Umeå, you can join in anyways, remotely works just as fine.
The point is to be in silence together, no matter where we are and create a pocket of peace for this one hour of the day.
So, for today this was it. I would love to hear your thoughts and experiences around silence! I am sure I am not the only one craving it!
Love,
Daria