YOU NEED SILENCE TO LIVE FULLY
I often start my yoga classes by asking the students to sense what their inner rhythm feels like, and to prepare you for this article, I will ask you the same thing right now: take a second to feel yourself, what is your rhythm right now? Do you feel spaciousness in your mind, in your body? Do you feel a rushing, an attempt at getting through what you are doing right now? How is the quality of silence in your mind, is it full, or more like 5 radio channels at the same time trying to get your attention and leaving you exhausted?
I am on a quest for a fuller, quieter mind, not because I want it fuller in thoughts and content, but fuller in depth and focus, and fuller in silence. And I bet you do too, even if you are not aware of it. I started writing this article on an evening of pre-summer, windows open, swallows screeching in the sky, and hearing the voice of kids playing outside. It was quiet, no one around me, no music playing, and somehow, I could feel thatthis silence was giving me space to think and to land into my skin again, after weeks of moving around and not pausing to feel life moving inside of me.
Silence as a quality of your body
Let me define the quality of silence for you: it is a physical, sensed experience of space in your body and in your mind, as if you don't have 10 current of thoughts happening at the same time, but one. As if your inner rhythm fits the rhythm of reality, of nature, of your body. Even if it is rare that you feel this sensation of silence in your mind, it is one you know, it has a tendency to be stubborn and to come back again and again, because it is a natural part of us humans: it's in the quality of your body and mind when you are in a flow state, or when the silence around you permeates your skin to give you just what you needed; it's the connexion to someone you love when both of you are really present. It's you losing yourself to dance, losing yourself into a topic, or observing a baby you love, when an emotion knocks at your door and you have no choice but to bow down to it and let yourself be into its wave.
This feeling of a pause, of purely being without consuming or distracting oneself is a very mundane experience, yet one that became more and more rare in my life, and I am sure in yours too. It is so rare that it actually feels like an event when it happens; my battery runs out on my phone and I am waiting for the bus, in silence, and my mind roars with ideas, observations, quietness. Or I decide to pick up a book and realise while reading that I am in dialog with the book in my mind, my thoughts completely there with the story and also deeply with myself, with something that happened a while ago and that is still asking for my attention, and in the silence of the book pages it gets a chance to emerge and tug at my sleeve. When I lie on my yoga mat before a class starts, and those few minutes where there is nothing to do but to tune in feels like a deep breath after having been underwater for a while.
These moments feel like a very ‘being my body’ type of experience, mundane, simple and yet so deep. I want more of them, and yet… the world pushes me to get away from them. With the speedification of everything (yes yes, I will blame social media and capitalism for that), my own thoughts have reduced to a fast flow of fleeting ideas, and I only get to dive deep in a topic when teaching a yoga class or when attending a course. How come? How is it possible that I tend to search for distractions constantly even if I know the treasure is in the non distracted times?
Distracted = no discomfort?
We are filling up empty mind space with immediate distraction not to feel, not to reflect, not to sense. Not to be connected to our body and what it requests. It is a very sad thing to loose the possibility to experience life fully, moving through us and teaching us, and instead distracting ourselves to not feel its fullness. And what do we remember of these distractions? Little to nothing , right? A friend of mine asked me what I remember from the last 30 minutes doom scroll I had, and to my horror, I remember not one single video I saw - what a slap in my face. All of these efforts to avoid the discomfort of being with myself in all the inner conflicts, pains, tensions, needs. And focus, silence are like muscles that we need to train to access them. The more you train, the more they are easy to connect to. The less you do... the more it becomes a fight to get back to yourself.
One of the comments under the video I will refer to in the next paragraph was saying: "You’re doom scrolling because you’re looking for something to transform you but you can’t stay with one thing for long enough to be transformed by it" -- and how true, how sad, and how simple.
Connecting to ourselves through presence
I watched a video essay of a youtuber (this one) and from there, I ricocheed in my mindand thought about what we loose in terms of connexion to ourselves and to otherswhen we are constantly rushing and disconnecting from sensing ourselves, where we are in our lives right now, and how it feels like in our bodies. Like, the embodied version of the loss of spoken narration she is talking about. Hang on for a minute, the connexion between this and the idea of silence is right there.
In her video essay, Nina talks about how we take photos during exciting special eventsof our lives and what it does to our literal memory of the event: maybe it’s a concert, or a wedding, or beautiful sunset. What makes this moment special is the sensations, the sounds, colours, the emotions that flooded in me in that moment, like a collage that my brain stores for me to tap back into if I want to. To remember is an intrinsically physical experience, and we take a photo to freeze it as an external memory. When I record it instead of being busy experiencing and memorising it, it becomes something on a screen, not some remembered in my body, in how I connected to the energy in the space, to the people with me. And we try to freeze it to remember it but most of the time, we won’t even look at the pictures we took, right? Because somehow it will be detached from its emotionality, its depth, a bit boring to rewatch. Only in experiencing my life through my body I am able to keep its depth as something I can revisit, change through, grow, learn from. Only if my attention is fully on what is happening in a sensory way can I experience magic in my life, and true satisfaction.
The magic of you is right there
For this magic to occur, this connexion state, we need to feel, to experience ourselves. To experience, we need to breathe and to put our attention on the sensory poems fed to us through our body: it is happening right now and you don’t need to do anything magical for ‘it’ (your body experiencing the world) to be present. That is something I am always in awe of: the fact that the magic I can feel after a good yoga practice, or bodywork session, is always there, available for me to feel if only I give myself a chance to. The complete banality of magic in our bodies - mind blowing if you ask me. It is in the little sensation of your heartbeat in your crossed ankles, in the air moving in your belly maybe. It might be in the flow, movement like sensation you feel down your right leg, like a slow river. Anything can be a bridge towards yourself if you do it with your full attention. Even washing your dishes, even walking down the stairs to go catch a bus. The magic awaits, if only we put our attention onto it.
