Silence...

There was a time when silence made me uncomfortable. Thoughts would flood my mind and make me anxious and uneasy. If I was having a conversation with someone and there was a gap, I would fill the silence with anything. Silence was awkward.

In silence I saw all my inadequacies, my limitations, my frailties, my failures. Yet it wasn't the silence that made me see myself that way, it was the noise. The noise clouds the truth with a million and one versions of it. Beyond the noise I recognize my Self and find a sense of it's all ok, a sense of peace.

Through meditation I have made peace with silence and I have found peace in silence. I have found peace within. It doesn't take much to get there. A moment of silence, a release of control and an acceptance of the moment as it is. In conversation with others, I find that we say much more in the gaps of silence between the words, in our body language, in our eye contact, in the thoughts we hold for and between each other, but we don't say with our words. I no longer fill the silence with chatter. I listen to the quietness.

There is a force in silence that is very powerful. In silence, thoughts become cohesive, they start making sense, things sort themselves out, answers become clear, the truth is laid out for us. In silence, Spirit has a chance to speak to us. Hunches, gut feelings, intuition and clarity become stronger, sharpened and more readily accessible to us. In silence we recharge to take on the world, we find strength, calmness and power.

In silence we are able to see everything, listen to everything, find everything, love everything, sense everything, know everything, understand everything. In silence we are. It is the silence between the notes that makes the music and it is the silence between the words that makes us.

Today is a good day to notice silence around you, to feel it, to drop your resistance to it, to be still in it, to look and listen in it without thought or judgment. When words are not enough, silence is.