It has taken me years to be ok with sitting in silence, in the middle of nothingness. Many MANY years. In the past, my mind would fill itself up with crazy thoughts, made up stories, narrating life as a form of control, anything and everything to avoid the silence. I recently hosted a 7-week book club, slowly dissecting and digesting 'The Untethered Soul' by Michael Singer. It is there that I learned about 'narrating life as a form of control' - up until that ahha moment, I had NO idea that this was even a thing. This narrating I was doing wouldn't just keep me entertained and always mentally on the run, but it would keep my mind distracted and make me feel more comfortable with everything that was going on around me.
To put this into context, about two years ago, my son said to me one day, "Do you have to always repeat what everyone is doing outloud?". I didn't quite get what he was talking about but I started to take note that I was actually doing just that. He would get up from the chair where we were watching a movie and I would say 'oh are you going to get a drink or to the bathroom?' or my dog would walk into the kitchen and I would say 'oh how sweet Bowser is getting a drink' or I would be in a meeting and someone would move in their seat and I would think 'are they uncomfortable, do they need something, are they bored, etc' and then I would ask...outloud. Those are the easy examples; imagine doing that all day long, with everything that crossed your path, cars, neighbors, plants, inanimate objects...
I actually thought I was being attentive. I had NO idea that this was a stress response created from my childhood where I had little to no voice, little to no control and needed to shut out the world in order to feel safe and secure, ie shut out and buffer myself and my emotions from life, instead of living it.
I’m calling this subconscious created chaos. Is this familiar to you?
Subconscious created chaos is a way for our subconscious, our ego, to protect us and keep us safe from feeling emotions that we’d stuffed away because they were too hard to deal with ‘then’...and even now. We feel safe in this place, this known state of being. And we stay busy, on the go, always doing something so we can avoid what happens when there is silence.
This is actually a form of ‘false protection’. It is driven from fear...fear of not knowing how we will feel or how to respond if and when we do slow down. We are being falsely protected from the silence, from our own truth and from allowing those unattended emotions to come to the surface because who knows what will happen then. It is our subconscious' job to protect us. The ego fights for this every day, to feel safe.
But we CAN be and feel safe in the silence too.
It’s a matter of learning how to gently & slowly peel back one emotion at a time, one emotion that rises to the top. This generally happens in the form of a thought about your current situation or life; something that doesn’t feel right to you anymore or something that doesn’t align to how you want things to be. It happens when you slow down just enough to allow something different to come into your mind, your heart, your world. It happens in moments of silence. It happens when you stop narrating life from a place of fear and control.
These things rise to the top when it’s time to see them and release them, exposing how your past experience is influencing your current actions. Even typing this out loud, exposing the possibility that we have a choice in how we sit in the silence, how we see and love on ourselves in this place, is creating butterflies in my stomach. Butterflies of the endless possibilities that await each of you when you experience life by letting go of control.
That’s how powerful sitting in the silence and allowing your truth to rise up is. And that’s also how scary it can be…scary enough to create those butterflies!
But speaking from my own experience, it is worth the discomfort. It takes an awareness that builds the desire into a daily practice. The empowered state of being that you will live from creates inherent joy and inner peace . This is our divine right. To witness what comes up when you are able to sit in the silence, consciously and confidently knowing you are safe, is the pathway to our your own truth and personal freedom.
To learn more about creating this daily practice for yourself, visit my website at http://www.joanneadducci.com.
