Awakening Silence

Study Of Clouds Over The Sea by C.W. Eckersberg

When was the last time you sat with your own silence? What arose within you?

The silence I've awoken from the depths of my being has been nothing short of revelatory.

With each inward dive I find more to uncover and unravel. So often we can feel things. We feel the discomfort and we just layer it or excuse it away with things and other thoughts we'll have to reconcile down the pike.

But the intentional silence I sit in now seems less like an act of grace and more of an awakening, a turbulent storm that is building inside of me.

This is perhaps why so many of us struggle to sit in a deep state of silence.

After all the silence awakens, you, all of you, the thoughts that have the potential to consume you, pain you, prod you and prick at you to a point of unbearable weight.

The insurmountable feelings that are resurrecting within me these days are all hard, dark, sorrow filled. They bring with them a dreary harshness. They are uncomfortable, they are sad, they are raw and visceral and hard to digest.

They are all the things I've never felt. We never truly feel them or can in this very heavy way until we begin to sit with them intentionally and them only.

My old world was so much softer, such a delicate place to land internally and externally. It was bright and carried a magical luminescence to it.

Have you noticed how your relationship with inner quietude shifts as life's seasons change?

The longing to be in the quietude was so inviting back then. An invitation into a beautiful wandering of ecstasy. It was sweet and melodic and allowed me to touch the incredible magic that life has the potential to offer.

But when the world darkens the inner wanderings call out to you less. Instead you do the opposite. You focus outward so there is less of the heaviness that burdens you. The heart that aches pounds lighter with all of the noise, but the silence authenticates the heart, the feelings, the unconscionable that is all too real. All too difficult to navigate and simply digest.

So really there is no escape. There's simply a confrontation into resistance and then a surrender into the silence that feels like a very loud void these days.

Perhaps you've felt this too—that moment when silence transforms from comfort to confrontation?

I find my feelings around feeling deeply are evolving in some way. My capacity is stretching beyond the self-imposed limitations I'd lived with all these years when life was easier.

Perhaps the weight of the feelings gives the emotions greater depths? Perhaps the girth of them forces us to feel more deeply?

The role of silence and solitude to access deeper emotions are similar, but the outcome is far different depending on where life finds you in this moment. Solitude has more of a pull, a yearning towards peace. We extend ourselves in the direction of the quiet. Where as silence can be a scary terrain to tread when emotions are heavy and bring with them a painful ache.

I've spent many decades sitting in silence intentionally, longingly, lovingly, but these days there's a dreaded fear that accompanies this subtle perpetuating longing towards silence.

But there is a longing nonetheless, that inner voice that is saying - just sit with it.

Perhaps this is the ultimate paradox of silence – how it both reveals and heals, confronts and comforts. The very silence that awakens our deepest sorrows also offers the space we need to truly feel them. And in feeling them fully, without distraction or noise, we begin to understand their meaning and purpose in our lives.

As for me I will sit with my silence, even as it thunders with uncomfortable truths. And with that I invite you to consider your own relationship with the quiet spaces in your life. What might they be trying to awaken in you? What wisdom lies waiting in the feelings you've yet to fully feel?

The journey into silence isn't always the peaceful retreat we imagine it to be. Sometimes it's a stormy confrontation with all we've been avoiding. But I'm beginning to understand that this is precisely what makes it so necessary – this raw, unfiltered communion with our deepest selves is where true awakening begins.