How I’ve Achieved Silence
Spiritual Principle : Silence
Silence, as many of us know, is defined by the complete lack of sound. Many of us do not recognize that silence isn’t being surrounded by acres of wooded landscape or lost in the blackness of space, and silence is not reading in the park on a calm Sunday afternoon. Silence is not a feeling that is experienced by all. I feel as though I have reached the point where I can say I have a relationship with silence.
Imagine going through a typical day, living your best life. Hanging out with friends, killing it in your career, and you go home to get ready for bed. Imagine falling asleep, dreaming of nothing, and waking up eight hours later. Some people would say that is untrue, that you must dream even if you don’t remember it. That’s not to say that dreaming of nothing is not dreaming. I do dream. I dream of peaceful darkness, where nothing exists, where there is no sound. In my slumber, I see myself sitting, legs crossed, meditating. I can see myself enjoying the silence. A question I’m sure you have is, but don’t you hear your breathing? If you could listen to your breath, it is the result of you not looking at yourself through a birdseye view.
When you look at yourself when you reflect on your life through a third-person viewpoint, you separate yourself and your emotions from a place far outside of yourself. When you approach life from a third-person point of view, you do not take any baggage with you. You don’t take your emotions or your thoughts; you are in a birdseye view to observe. A third-person perspective is not something I think you can achieve overnight. I think it is something you have to continue to practice with your conscious mind, something near ten-thousand hours worth of external monitoring that leads you to withdraw subconsciously.
In the medical sense, this is called disassociation. Disassociation is when your body will remove your conscious mind from the situation to keep you protected, often occurring during trauma or uncomfortable situations. It is not something I recommend. Your brain needs to process events that happen to allow you to grow. So how can you become a master of silence without damaging yourself through disassociation? It is as easy as reflecting on your day or reflecting on moments you went through that day. I often chose times where I was surrounded by people, at parties or private events. I often thought of how I performed at work, on the track, or at school. I took the time to step outside of myself and truly judge my actions. I tested to see if I was ethical, upstanding. I looked about the rooms I had been in to see the reactions of everyone I interacted with; I saw how my actions affected other people. I saw reactions based on my actions.
I’m not sure if other people feel the same way that I do. I strive for every interaction with others to be a positive experience, compounded on more positive experiences. It is the art of being able to induce change into your life. I often saw pieces of myself that I didn’t like, and I saw opportunities to improve whenever I saw those pieces that I didn’t like about myself or I saw those opportunities to improve. I always set out to apologize to the people I thought I hurt, and I took the time to make sure every experience was positive after that. It has taken years of self-reflection, communication with other people, and the willpower to be a person to people they didn’t know needed.
After so many hours of disassociating by default and self-reflecting can allow you, while you are in a deep sleep, to separate yourself from your thoughts, to live a tiny fraction of your life in silence can play a big part. You don’t have to go through a dopamine detox; wake yourself up when your reach REM. It just takes practice in the conscious mind, and it will spill over into different aspects of your life. You might be able to think twice before you speak, apologize quicker when you recognize you might have hurt someone in the past. At least, these are the things that have resulted from me looking at myself through a birdseye view, surrounded by silence.
