In the midst of that great, looming silence, I’d sit and listen.
But what filled my ears wasn’t silence at all….it was my own thoughts, like unruly guests at a party, some making sense, some babbling nonsense. And I wondered, are these really mine?
Am I pulling the strings, or are they running their own wild show?
I tried to quiet them down, hush them with mantras.
Yet, even in that space of quiet repetition, the thoughts wriggled through, and before long, the mantras themselves became part of the noise. It was maddening.
One day, while walking in the mountains, something shifted. Maybe it was the altitude, maybe the open air, but I touched my fingertip to my forehead, then placed another on the back of my skull. I began to search the space between those two points. What was in there?
It’s a question I’m inviting you to ask yourself. When you look into that space, between the front and back of your head, what do you find? If you say “my brain,” that’s just another thought, part of the endless chatter. But if you listen deeper, feel deeper – what’s really there?
For me, what I found was emptiness. And, strangely, that emptiness was silent. Thoughts darted in and out, yes, but they couldn’t pierce that quiet void. The silence wasn’t just the absence of sound – it was something more profound, like the space between notes that makes music come alive.
This little practice is magic in its simplicity. It’s always there, always ready, and the beauty of it is, I can’t quite SEE the silence because it’s the place from which I see. It’s the space that holds my awareness. No matter where I am – in my head, in my heart, or out in the chaos of the world… it’s this endless, spacious silence that feels like home.
Rumi whispered the same truth in his prayer: “Let me be quiet in the middle of the noise.”
He didn’t ask for the noise to disappear, because he knew better. Life is full of noise; inside and out. But in the thick of it, we can discover this core of silence that refuses to be disturbed.
When life gets loud, when the world’s demands bear down like a thousand drummers, or when self-doubt and anxieties start throwing their weight around, I return to this practice. I look into the middle of my head, my heart, my very being, and what do I find?
Silence. Sweet, healing silence. And in that quiet space, nothing can press against me because there’s no wall to press against.
Krishnamurti called this silence the highest form of intelligence…pure, whole, and untouched by the noise. It’s not mine, not yours. It just IS. And the more I sink into that, the more the noise loses its grip. The demands, the judgments, the incessant thoughts; they pass right through me.
And there I am, quiet, in the middle of it all.
A Buddhist teacher once asked a question that still echoes in my mind: “What do you have to let go of so there’s no pressure on you?”
Maybe it’s this idea that we are something solid, that we exist as a defined entity in our heads or hearts. But when we see with fresh eyes that there’s nothing substantial in here – just silent emptiness – the pressures have nothing left to push against.
The noise flows on, and we stay still.
Image courtesy of Lilianna Heitmann | Salutogenese Institut
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