Silence

We’re constantly chewing on more than just our food. If we want to create more silence in our lives, we need to bring more awareness to what we’re consuming.

Here’s a quick re-cap of the Four Nutriments:

1. Actual, edible food. As we know, this has an effect on our moods. Hint: Eat more whole foods and less refined foods.
2. Sense impressions. This includes magazines we read, TV shows or movies we watch, web sites we visit, conversations we have, that kinda thing. Long after we consume media, our minds are “chewing” on it. You chewing on good stuff?
3. Volition. This describes our primary motivation. Is it to deepen our relationships, grow and serve profoundly? Or, to see how much money we can make and how many Twitter followers we can get? Either way, we’re consuming this throughout the day!
4. Consciousness, both individual and collective. This refers to our own thoughts and the collective consciousness of our friends, community and world.

Let’s take a quick look at a couple of those.

Sensory food.

We want to bring more mindfulness to what we’re consuming. As Thich Nhat Hanh tells us, we’re digesting this “food” long after we consume it. If we’re stuffing ourselves with junk sensory food, we’re going to have a tough time connecting to something bigger than ourselves!

Think for a moment about all the conversations you’ve had, magazines you’ve read, plus TV shows and movies you’ve watched over the last day or two or three. Was it the kind of stuff that nourished or depleted your soul? How about a quick inventory?

Over the last 72 hours, these conversations, entertainment + music nourished my soul:

____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Over the last 72 hours, these conversations, entertainment + music did not nourish my soul:

____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Are you eating more whole foods or refined foods? Notice any opportunities for optimization?

Here’s to choosing our sensory food wisely!

Volition. How’s yours?

Thich Nhat Hanh gives us a very powerful way to check in: —> Are you doing what you most want to be doing with your life? Do you know what that is?

Those are powerful, challenging, dynamic questions.

The only way to answer them in the most powerful, authentic way is to give yourself the silence through which that “still, small voice” can whisper into your soul’s ear and help you navigate your life.

Joseph Campbell captures this beautifully in The Power of Myth (see Notes) where he tells us: “This is an absolute necessity for anybody today. You must have a room, or a certain hour or so a day, where you don’t know what was in the newspapers this morning, you don’t know who your friends are, you don’t know what you owe anybody, you don’t know what anybody owes you. This is a place where you can simply experience and bring forth what you are and what you might be. This is the place of creative incubation. At first you might find that nothing happens there. But if you have a sacred place and use it, something eventually will happen.”

How’s your sacred place?

You using it?

Here’s to creating the silence to optimize our deepest purpose!

P.S. Know this: “When you’ve been able to still all the noise inside of you, when you’ve been able to establish silence, a thundering silence, in you, you begin to hear the deepest kind of calling from within yourself.”

Radio NST.

*Cue Announcer voice*

“Hi, welcome to Radio NST! Non-Stop Thinking coming at you all day, every day with absolutely noooooo commercial interruptions!”

Hah!

Reminds me of Alan Cohen who tells us we have another radio station available to us.

In Why Your Life Sucks and What You Can Do About It (see Notes), he tells us: “Imagine a radio station that we’ll call KNOW broadcasting sound advice from somewhere deep inside you 24 hours a day. Then imagine you have a tuner capable of receiving its signal. If you set your tuner to the right frequency, you hear the broadcast and pick up vital information. If your dial is set elsewhere, you miss the message.”

How do we tune into *that* station?

Silence. :)

Then there’s rumination.

Next time you’re thinking the same thought over again and again, imagine a cow chewing some food, swallowing it, regurgitating it back up, chewing some more, swallowing again, then regurgitating it back up and…

That’s rumination. We don’t want to do that.

Here’s how Sonja Lyubomirsky puts it in The How of Happiness (see Notes): “The combination of rumination and negative mood is toxic. Research shows that people who ruminate while sad or distraught are likely to feel besieged, powerless, self-critical, pessimistic, and generally negatively biased.”

The solution: We need to learn how to turn off Radio NST and quit ruminating!

Here’s one way to help:

Fasting.

It’s a key practice for optimization.

Here’s how David Perlmutter and Alfredo Villoldo talk about the nutritional side of it in their great book Power Up Your Brain where they look at the neuroscience of enlightenment (see Notes): “The dietary practices of fasting and calorie reduction, coupled with regular exercise, are powerful epigenetic factors that modify the expression of your DNA.”

That’s a whole ‘nother conversation about how simply reducing the number of calories we consume positively affects the expression of our DNA. Powerful stuff.

And, of course, the same thing applies with our minds.

When we’re *constantly* bombarding ourselves with external stimuli, we’re not giving our minds adequate time to recover and clean up all the residual stimulation, fear and anxiety.

So, let’s fast.

Can you go a day with no e-mail? How about no online time at all for a day? If you’re feeling bold maybe we can even remove books and even all conversations.

(I love unplugging completely from the internet on the weekends to let my brain settle down. But letting go of book?! Oh, my! Hah. :)

Seriously. How about one day a week where you’re totally unplugged. No email, no online time. The Wi-Fi isn’t even on in your house.

Try it! I think you’ll love it.

Your consciousness will thank you.

So good.

Makes me think of Abraham Maslow, George Leonard, Joseph Campbell and James Michener.

Maslow tells us that, in self-actualizing individuals, the apparent dichotomy between work and play dissolves. While George Leonard tells us: “Could all of us reclaim lost hours of our lives by making everything—the commonplace along with the extraordinary—a part of our practice?”

Campbell tells us: “But the simple tasks of our life, when you’re doing them because they’re a function or factor in the life that you love and have chosen and have given yourself, then they don’t weigh you down.”

And he continues: “All life has drudgery to it… In Zen, however, even while you’re washing the dishes, that’s a meditation, that’s an act of life. It’s not a chore, and it’s not what you’ve just been calling it. Sometimes the drudgery itself can become part of the hero deed. The point is not to get stuck in the drudgery but to use it to free you.”

And, finally, this James Michener gem always blows me away: “The master in the art of living makes little distinction between his work and his play, his labor and his leisure, his mind and his body, his information and his recreation, his love and his religion. He hardly knows which is which. He simply pursues his vision of excellence at whatever he does, leaving others to decide whether he is working or playing. To him, he’s always doing both.”

Are you fixated on separating life from work?

How can you bring just a tiny bit more mindfulness, presence and joy to your life?!

An island of self.

That’s a nice place to hang out. :)

Reminds me of Marcus Aurelius: “Men seek for seclusion in the wilderness, by the seashore, or in the mountains – a dream you have cherished too fondly yourself. But such fancies are wholly unworthy of a philosopher, since at any moment you choose you can retire within yourself. Nowhere can man find a quieter or more untroubled retreat than in his own soul; above all, he possesses resources in himself, which he need only contemplate to secure immediate ease of mind – the ease that is but another word for a well-ordered spirit. Avail yourself often, then, of this retirement and so continually renew yourself.”

This wisdom from Ralph Waldo Emerson comes to mind as well: “It is easy in the world to live after the world’s opinion; it is easy in solitude to live after our own; but the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude.”

Here’s to creating mini-retreats to our beautiful island of self!

Store consciousness + mind consciousness.

Thich Nhat Hanh comes back to this idea again and again throughout the book.

Quick re-cap: All of our thoughts and emotions are present in our “store consciousness.” Think of them as hanging out in the basement. When we allow those thoughts to hang out in our minds, it’s as if they come up from the basement and hang out in the living room—moving from store consciousness to mind consciousness.

Now, if we’re not paying attention and unconsciously “water”/allow the negative stuff up into the living room, we may find ourselves with an unwanted guest taking over the place.

That’s also known as being in a really bad mood/depressed/etc. :)

The solution? Bring awareness to which seeds we’re touching and watering. Practice NOT watering the negative stuff. Tend to the positive. Nhat Hanh tells us that in Buddhism this is called “the practice of diligence.” In Plum Village, his meditation center in France, they call it “selective watering.”