Listen With A Silent Mind
How your mental chatter impacts your relating.
I woke up Saturday morning feeling spacious and not anxious. Rested and calm, like there was room within me, corners empty, space to move.
What struck me immediately was how unfamiliar this was, as of late. How it had been quite some time that I had woken feeling this way. Kind of sad, and kind of totally reasonable given the amount of stress in the world, with an innately sensitive nervous system and constitution, and the reality of being in what feels like the infancy and major growing season of my career.
There’s usually a lot of mental chatter going on in my mind and it’s been feeling increasingly harder to wrangle my attention.
I’ve been grasping and striving and over-efforting.
I’ve not been able to accept and sit with the level of confusion and chaos and change that is the transformation process.
This transformation is mirrored externally with a world in great flux, great chaos, great shadow.
It’s hard to be with it all.
And so I return to the basics. The principles of mindfulness: awareness and compassion.
Letting the mental chatter be the mental chatter. Simply observing and feeling direct experience.
Letting my sense of confusion around my purpose, what I am doing, how to go about doing it be confusion. Simply observing the confusion and feeling direct experience.
Letting the waves of emotion rise and fall each day without judging their frequency or intensity. Simply observing and feeling direct experience.
Listen with a silent mind. Listen beneath the surface.
After waking to a clear, relaxed mind and comfortable, stretched-out body I renewed a commitment to myself:
I will not grasp for this feeling.
Instead, I will consciously take in the felt sense of this spaciousness and appreciate it.
Here’s what it felt like:
spacious~stretched out~almost orgasmic and tingly on my skin~positive thoughts~clear head~clear cells
a re-set~slate cleaned~reborn
extreme gratitude for feeling good, calm, content, peaceful
INSIDE
I then got up and went to the bathroom mirror and exercised a beautiful practice inspired by clinical psychologist Dr. Shauna Shapiro’s book, Good Morning I Love You.
I looked at myself and said ‘I love you’ ten times. To rewire my brain. To let my subconsious hear me, hear my voice. To see and witness myself loving myself. To linger with that.
You know what happened right after? I noticed my mind wanting to think about all the reasons why I felt this way.
Was it the herbal tincture and tea the night before?
Was it Saturn stationing direct?
Was it cumulative rest and recovery?
And then, my conscious choice to ask: “Does it matter?”
NO.
This is the brain doing what it is designed to do. To gather facts to support theories of which it will continue to back up and look for in a continual feedback loop, supporting its own biases.
If I know why this is happening, then I can make it happen again.
Cue - grasping.
Make it happen again. Ego at work. Again, not bad ego, wrong ego. Just living its design.
Yet grasping leads to suffering, to the constant flip flop of duality.
The subtle disguise for grasping onto this beneficial experience leads to resisting or rejecting less than ideal experiences that don’t feel this way. It’s a mind trap. A suffering trap.
Grasping to this moment of peace and spaciousness only makes it harder to accept and be with non-beneficial experience. Like the days I don’t feel spacious.
Instead of maintaining curiosity and investigating the truth of my own experience, preferred or not, easy or hard, comfortable or uncomfortable, joyful or painful.
Curiosity and appreciation are the medicine. They help us contact equanimity and internal anchoring.
Of course I’d love to have more days than not of feeling this way. I’m allowed my preferences, we all are.
This experience illuminates the interwoven web of the parts of our mind. If our thoughts create our reality, then constantly grasping for and holding onto ‘nice’ experiences and shunning and resisting ‘not so nice’ experiences, leads to constant unrest, the very opposite of contentment. Never here, always wanting something else.
Observe your direct experience.
Go in the mirror and say I love you.
Try, again and again to investigate the truth of your own experience.
The two wings of mindfulness are awareness and compassion. We observe and we hold with gentle care and love our human experiences.
And just maybe we come closer to the middle path, resisting the big swings to what we prefer or what we detest. At least according to the current belief system of the mind.
Surrender attachment and grasping.
Emotional regulation, inspired by simple Buddhist teachings.
Curiosity and appreciation are the medicine. They help us contact equanimity and internal anchoring.
Learning to monitor yourself is a practice. There needs to be some source of motivation for doing so. What is that to you?
How do you see your own self-awareness building impacting the quality and strength of your connections and relationships?
And why do your connections and relationships matter to you?
As human beings, it is our relationships that fundamentally impact our health more than any other factor.
We are interrelated and interconnected and always in relationship.
Personal growth is about community. How we are impacts all those around us. Our nervous systems read and feed each other. We mirror each other, we regulate each other, we dysregulate each other. We trigger each other. We lose the ability to use our words and we resort to violence of all kinds. And we end up repeating endless cycles of hurt and suffering from the micro to macro.
I don’t know about you but I’m done.
We always have the choice to create or consume.
We all have consumed programming from society and systems and our awareness of this allows for us to have choice and agency to either remain programmed, de-program, revise the programming or create new programming all together. Likely a combination of all of these.
This is a moment in life to be a leader. Be your own emotional leader. Observe your own personal power and how you exercise it by your thoughts, choices and behavior.
One person changes the world by changing their internal world and the rippling out of that into their web of relationships.
We are fundamentally in relationship.
This is our design, our gift and our responsibility.
Take care of your emotions, your mental thought patterns, your physiology and stress level. It all matters. You matter. We matter.
Lots of love and let me know in the comments what you think of this. I went for it, playing around with using the voice I have and this platform of listeners.
Big hugs,
Britta