Our modern culture is usually filled with activity and noise. Do we know how to sit in quiet? I mean no noise except what naturally occurs around us. Can we do it? What could possibly be the benefit of quiet when the world culture has become so loud?
I love promoting opposites. Opposites shake things up. They rattle our cages a bit so we wake up, we stir, and sometimes we get quiet enough to hear ourselves.
When things are too loud, get quiet!!!
It is amazing to me how many of us do not like quiet. I have turned on the TV just for noise in the house when I am alone at times. I have created drama just to have things so loud that I cannot hear what my quiet inner thoughts are. How silly is that??
When we cannot get to a peaceful place, get quiet!!!
Life can feel like a whirlwind, especially while being chronically ill. The noise and disruption of doctors, procedures, treatments, and medicine and aches and pains and illness drama and the opinions of others and on and on it all rings so loudly while we are chronically ill.
To slow down the drama of being chronically ill, sometimes quiet is the ticket. It can slow us down to calm our spirits and help us listen to what is really going on in our bodies. We can have a chance at hearing what our bodies are trying to tell us by being ill.
When things are simply out-of-whack, get quiet!!!
No one single human being has all the answers, has never existed, never will. Yet we all have an inner wisdom inside of us that never gets exhausted.
How can we begin to hear that inner wisdom when we live in such a loud culture? We learn how to get quiet. We tune out what we cannot change and create as much quiet as we can tolerate.
This takes practice. Sometimes picking up a book can still the mind.
How to find quiet in a noisy world
While we are chronically ill, there is more noise than we need and we don’t even know it sometimes. We get so used to the noise that it starts to feel like air, like a requirement for existence.
Stop and listen. What are you hearing that is simply creating extra useless noise?
- Television – is it just noise to keep us company?
- Computer – are we using our computers for entertainment and company?
- Phone – are we having any useless gossipy conversations that create a negative atmosphere?
- Social Media – are you hearing beeps, tones, buzzers to alert you to every thought someone has on social media?
- People – are there any ranting people in your life that are creating useless noise?
Those are the obvious ones. What about the things that you are so used to that you rarely have a thought about?
- Does your faucet drip?
- Do you have a dehumidifier that is easily heard?
- Do you have air filters that blow noise?
- Is there a lot of street sound coming into your house?
- Does your refrigerator have a noisy life of its own?
- Does the wind rattle your windows?
- Are your washer and dryer in your bedroom that disrupts your peace?
You get the picture. There is noise everywhere. Some of it you cannot control, some of you can.
For my health, I need to have air filters running and a dehumidifier sucking loudly all the time. But there are times when peace and quiet are needed above the health benefits of their noise. I love the rarely chosen times of turning them all off and enjoying the quiet.
There are three noises in my town that I have no control over and they invade my peace too frequently.
- The stone quarry shocks the snot out of me when they blast. Every window in the house rattles and it takes me a moment to recover from the sudden blasts.
- The Air Force base is close enough to my house that they used to fly jets overhead and break the sound barrier, creating almost the same sudden shocking noise as the quarry blasts.
- And then there are the unusually high amount of sirens for a small town that disrupts my peace. It sometimes sounds like New York City with all the sirens, thoroughly amazed at that one.
Absolutely nothing we can do about things we have no control over. I actually like quiet, always have. So, for me, living in a fairly quiet environment works for me, in that aspect.
What is your environment like? What can you quiet in your home so that you can hear yourself think?
Do you even want to think, to hear your own thoughts, to hear an inner wisdom that is trying to be heard?
Surprisingly, many people do not, even when they say they do. When put to the test of creating quiet, even the people who usually say they want it, cannot get there.
When some of us get there, our own thoughts are not worth listening to. Meditation is a good way to rest our minds from the self-talk that is useless and find the quiet of our minds. This too takes tons of practice.
I have required guided meditation to even get started. When I can listen to a soft gentle calming voice tell me what to focus on, I do better with meditation. My goal is to do it on my own but the time is not yet here.
The health benefits of meditation alone are worth learning how to get our minds there.
“Many studies have been conducted to look at how meditation may be helpful for a variety of conditions, such as high blood pressure, certain psychological disorders, and pain. A number of studies also have helped researchers learn how meditation might work and how it affects the brain.” ~ NCCIH, NIH; Meditation: In Depth
and…
“During the process of meditation, accumulated stresses are removed, energy is increased, and health is positively affected overall.” ~ NCBI, PubMed; Meditation: Process and Effects
While we hear the quiet in our environment, interesting things can happen. We can find out more about ourselves.
For me, that chatter that rolls around in my thinking about all kinds of things sounds quite silly to me when I am sitting in quiet. In through the quiet slips the peace that I yearn for. When I start to hear the peaceful thoughts, I desire more and am willing to keep listening.
When I cannot get to a quiet place where I can actually hear peace, sometimes I have to seek it out. I have to change my surroundings to sweep out the noise cobwebs. Taking walks in the country is my favorite way of breathing in peaceful fresh air and thoughts.
There are so many things we can do to hear the quiet, listen to our inner wisdom and find a more peaceful spirit.
- It is a choice whether we want quiet to explore the possibilities
- It is a choice to turn off the noise in our immediate environment
- It is a choice to listen for the wisdom that can come from quiet
- It is a choice to shake things up, change the environment, so we can air out the mental cobwebs
- It is a choice to learn to enjoy the quiet times
- It is a choice to learn to truly like yourself, like your own company while in the quiet
- It is a choice to practice quiet, over an over again, liking yourself more and more each time
What are your choices? Do you do well with quiet? Do you like yourself when you are alone with the quiet?
I can guarantee that if I had some quiet time with you, I could tell you things that I like about you!!!! I sincerely mean that.
Maribeth Baxter, MBNC (Certified Mind-Body Nourishment Coach)
FaceBook Page for Amazing Wholeness
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[…] looked at a Time for Quiet, now it is time to look at noise. Opposites can do different things for us at different times. […]