Deep Listening
There is a mindful technique that some find powerful where you sit somewhere outside, close your eyes, and just listen. The purpose is simply to locate the direction the sounds are coming from. To merely take in their different volumes, notes, and estimate the distance sound is traveling. To try and feel your body in reference to the space between itself and the sounds. Although it seems easy on paper, the art of listening can be, well, difficult. Frustrating in fact.
We often want to hear what our human agenda desires. The recognition from the boss. The gratitude from our children. The affirmed attraction from our significant other. Those can be the loud noises we are consistently seeking. An endless attempt to fill an empty well with words. When we practice listening instead of controlling what we hear, we are opening ourselves up to hold space for faith. Faith is a sister to trust. A friend to a higher knowing that even if things aren’t exactly the way we want to find them, there are spaces between the notes that hold life in harmony. That fills life with love. With balance. With divine order. ALWAYS.
When we accept this, the exercise becomes not to recognize the sounds but to listen with the heart to the silence. The world can be loud. News. Gossip. Fear. War. Destruction. Looking at these things with love and compassion is a necessary step in being human, in dealing with our emotions, for rising into service for the humanrace. If the noise becomes where we stop one can find themselves in despair. But if we retrain our ear and heart to linger in the spaces between all the noise, that is where we can truly let down our guard safely, and rest.
Retry the mindful technique from above. This time every time a noise comes, pay attention to the silence that immediately follows it. The silence holds all the sounds together, it gives the perspective to understand that sound is being made. The silence holds the frame in place.
All is well. You are loved.