“When you lose touch with your inner stillness, you lose touch with yourself. When you lose touch with yourself, you lose yourself in the world”. – Eckhart Tolle.
There is a lot of noise in our daily world. We have the literal sense of the word noise, which comes from outside: cars, busses, planes, people talking, honking cars, sirens, wind, rain, air conditioning, refrigerators, televisions, etc. We often get blind to the noise around us, until the moment you shut out the noise.
I live in a really big city, São Paulo. The noise level in this city is insane and I only realised how bad it was until I got my noise cancelling headphones and was able to really shut off: be focused, be with myself. Funny enough, this new discovered silence made me realise how active the other type of noise is. Inside me. The noise of my thoughts, me talking to myself, the noise of judgments, ideas, memories, things to remember, things to say…
The only moment where there is no noise at all is when I find the silence in myself. When I come to the mat to find inner stillness. That silence doesn’t come by itself, I need to first calm down. In my meditation I listen to the outside noises, pay attention to it and see if I can notice the silences in between the noises. Listening to this silence awakens my inner stillness. My place of tranquility.
Stillness is part of our nature. It is the moment where there are no perceptions, thoughts or a world around us. You become awareness. It is the moment that I am completely absorbed with what goes on inside me. What do I feel? How is my posture? Where do I have to let go? Where should I put a little more effort? What does my breath do? This is the moment when my mind is occupied, but in a silent way. It listens, instead of talks, it discovers instead of judges, it is in the now instead of the past or the future. My mind is silent and because of that the world around me silences too. Although I do have to admit, noise cancelling headphones are making it all a whole lot easier!
yogitine 