Taking Time
I am leaving today to spend 10 days of silence practicing moral rules, imperatives and reaching for personal goals. The trip starts with being modesty in dress, food consumption and life style and trails along with committing to nonviolence, truthfulness, celibacy and non-stealing.
I realize many people do not quite understand my motives, desires or aspirations to not speak for 10 days. In fact, the first time I went people feared I would struggle integrating back into society or maybe I would be speaking dialect and performing strange rituals. My experience and what others have reported is that I have proven to come back more tolerant, understanding, free, healthy and positively motivated. Which goes to show there is great probability that our perceptions of unknown things of this nature are based on unrealistic fear.
We all fear the unknown and unfamiliar until it is not unknown to our own experience. The true fear of such an experience is that we are afraid of sitting in silence with ourselves. Seeing what resides in the crevices of our being seems like it may be a very lonely painful process. Our paradigms lead us to believe that to bring awareness to these parts, being alone with our own thoughts is deathly frightening. As though without subduing the pain with drugs or having another human being present to validate experience we may go insane and never come back.
For me, the other side of that fear and what I have found is clarity, understanding and compassion for life experiences. My compassion is for the similar struggles we have all had to endure. Trauma, death, heartbreak and broken trust knocks on all doors. There are genetic, environmental and cultural reasons that have programmed us to choose to stay in the pain rather than move past it. Therefore, as unique as each person’s story, the degree of experience determines how it is subconsciously stored and dealt with to avoid re-experiencing it. In that we are in fact unique with different blocks set in our own path to happiness, joy and love in our experience of life. People carry around self-limiting fears and beliefs that they are not really aware of and act and react according to these blocks. These 10 day allow time to meet the blocks, gain insights and awareness and let things go.
For that on this holiday season of Thanksgiving I am thankful for awareness, the ability to look, understand and build new trust in relationships. It starts with the relationship with self but the ripple effect blankets over to have what is needed to give and repay this gift to family, friends, loved ones and clients.
Enjoy Thanksgiving love and bliss to you.
I will be back with you on December 5th~
