It’s amazing how much Silence can take care of, if only we give it the chance.
By the end of the day yesterday, I was aware of a low-grade agitation in my system.
I could feel it as I walked the dogs in the early spring warm night air.
Subtle, this sense of unease.
Like an unspoken energetic mantra: all is not well, all is not well.
All is not well? I asked myself curiously.
As I tracked it more carefully in my system, it felt like an underlying sense of disturbance: a feeling of being generally disturbed by life.
How could we not feel deeply disturbed in moments?
How could our hearts not ache, perpetually?
We are inseparable from this planet, from this People, from the very fabric of human life.
If we really let it in? It’s disturbing and it’s heartbreaking.
Add in the privileged challenge of wearing a dozen different hats; the juggling of intimate roles and relations; the complexity of tasks at hand…
Add in the heat of hormones, or the nagging needs of kids and dogs, or a simple lack of personal time and space… and there it is again, this subtle presence of unease. This heartache.
There’s a purity in opening to this heartache, this grief that comes with life. Sometimes all we need is a good, deep cry.
But then what we add to that purity of heartache is so often unnecessary and unhelpful. This content of our minds that fuels a noise of suffering…
Then it becomes a subtle disturbance, unchecked.
Or a sour taste in the heart, a darkened lens of perception, permeating everything.
Or a subconscious mantra: “all is not well,” affirming the opposite of what we want.
I stopped in the middle of the dark night street, letting the dogs sniff luxuriously on the side of the road.
I decided to turn towards this subtle agitation, this disturbance of my heart and mind, and give it the attention it deserves.
It started with a simple confession to myself, out loud in the warm spring night: “I feel disturbed. I feel uneasy. My heart hurts.”
So intimate. So simple and honest.
And with this confession, a crack, a welling up of self-compassion. A remembering love for oneself, in all this life includes.
And then simply letting Silence take care of it…
Letting the quiet love of my own emptiness receive the noise of disturbance.
It takes less than an instant to turn towards it fully, whatever it might be. To give it the attention it yearns for.
It takes less than an instant to fall back into Silence, back into the arms of the holy.
Isn’t this a wonder?
All that’s required is our openness and our attention.
The holy is always right here waiting for us, at the heart of disturbance, at the core of unease.
Waiting for our confession, our willingness, our surrender.
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