By Elizabeth Herman
Find strength in stillness with the power of silence. A meditation teacher shares tips on how to eliminate distractions and channel balance and energy.
The power of silence is much needed in this noisy world of constant cell phone distraction, social media addiction, and bad news on nearly every channel. A little solitude and time spent meditating can take you from an overload of sound to the stillness of silence.
We recently caught up with Philip Fraser, who has been teaching Art of Living’s Silent Retreat since the early 1990s, to talk about the power of silence. Philip offers his insights on letting go of distractions, becoming more present and aligned, and channeling balance and energy through the practice of stillness.
Being in alignment
If someone is out of alignment with themselves, and therefore harming their own system, chances are they’re going to be insensitive to others around them and to the environment as well. But when we’re in alignment, we’re sensitive to our own nature and to the world around us. Alignment starts at an individual level – so how do we get back into it?
Children are completely in alignment with themselves. They know when they’re tired or hungry; when they’re upset, they cry; when they’re happy, they laugh. There’s no filter, no interruption between the emotion and the action. This is our natural state.
To re-align yourself with your experience, you need to allow yourself to experience your feelings and process your situations as a child would. In this way, you give yourself an outlet, which in turn gives you a degree of separation after the fact. You’ve already experienced a reaction, so these problems don’t have the chance to take over your mind later on.
Of course, we need to have the ability to perform socially in order to exist in the world, and that means we can’t cry whenever we feel like it – but this often leads to a complete disconnection with ourselves, and we can’t seem to reconnect.
Stillness
A very simple way to process these feelings, to come back into alignment with yourself, is just to practice stillness. Not just physical stillness, but mental as well. You’re giving yourself a break.
The average person never stops. We’re inundated with external stimuli, and trained to be constantly multitasking. Not many people will feel comfortable sitting quietly or focusing on one task anymore – you see it in airports, for instance. Nobody is content to just sit there. We’re constantly involved in some form of activity.
Balance
One of the many results of this constant activity is the inability to comfortably fall asleep. We don’t feel like our minds are capable of settling down at night.
Nature works in cycles – you have day and night, light and dark, winter and spring, and at the root of all of these, dormancy and activity. Your mind, body, and spirit need that stillness, that silence, to properly rest.
I illustrate this with an analogy of a bow and arrow. If you want the arrow to fly far one way, you pull it back in the opposite direction and let go. Instinctively, we know this, but nowadays it’s hard to find the time and place to slow down, turn off our cell phones, and spend time with nature and with ourselves. The silent retreat gives us an opportunity to do this.
Releasing thoughts and emotions
Stillness rejuvenates us; it allows us to release our thoughts and feelings by experiencing them. We tend to deal with emotions by experiencing them briefly, then putting them away and claiming we’re fine. But these emotions don’t go away – they become dormant, stored inside of you. And so many of us just leave them there, or dwell on them, neither of which are helpful strategies.
The silent retreat helps us to realign ourselves in a formal way, through meditation and focused attention to the breath and body. During meditation, we often, without even trying, work through those old dormant emotions.
This doesn’t mean that you need to relive traumatic events, or have a breakdown – it’s just, very simply, a time of letting go. There’s definitely a degree of separation when you’re observant of your feelings – “This is how I’m feeling right now,” or “This is what’s happening in my thoughts.” This awareness is enough to release those emotions, to send them on their way. It’s a bit of a challenge, because we aren’t used to being alone with ourselves, facing ourselves like that. But it’s transformative.
Pure energy
Another way of realigning ourselves is to realize that we are, quite simply, pure energy. For example, kids have so much great energy, and they spring back so easily from every emotion. That fluidity, that flexibility, is our nature. Our nature is to be diverse; our nature is to have a lot of varied emotions going on at any given moment.
At some point, we start to deny any negative thoughts or emotions within ourselves. We strive to only feel happiness. But can you imagine going to a movie and watching people being happy for two hours? It would be torture! We enjoy, live, and thrive on the full experience of life, the dark and light. It’s what makes us whole.
To learn more about Silent Retreats offered by the Art of Living Foundation, join “Discover the Power of Silence” - a free introductory session online with a live instructor and get all your questions answered.
This article was originally published by the Art of Living Retreat Center blog.
By Elizabeth Herman - a long time meditator, PhD in English, with concentrations in Rhetoric and Composition, and Literature, she offers writing support to clients, teaches locally, lives in Boone, NC, and volunteers for a better world.
