A Quiet Mind

I had a huge realization a couple of months ago. It feels like everything is different and yet nothing has changed. It was around what is meant by a quiet mind.

Most people recognize the benefit to our lives and our health, both physical and mental, in approaching life with a calm, quiet, ready to respond mind rather than a busy, overwhelmed mind. And yet I'd noticed that for a lot of people, perhaps most people, this seemed a distant possibility. Or something thought to be impossible. In conversations with clients, people would go to great lengths to convince me that this just wasn't possible for a whole host of reasons and often one person's reasons were the exact opposite of someone else's reasons.

What if the only reason you can't is the thought that you can't?

One client, when I asked her to look to the quiet silence, started listing out all the reasons why she hadn't felt that in the past. That is not actually looking to our quiet mind. That is doubling down on busy thinking.

Human change is made via insight or realization. I mean the lasting permanent kind of change where everything is different after and you never go back to seeing the world in the same way. You've made real a truth about how the world works. We often call it insight because it begins by looking inward. It's a sight from within.

Many people, teachers, and gurus tell others to quiet their minds. This then leads, understandably, to focusing on why our mind is not quiet. Tips, strategies and techniques for how to "quiet the mind" proliferate. It's an action of suppression. Many clients tell me how they focus on their thinking and imagine it like train cars or riverboats passing by. They aim to focus on the spaces between the cars or the boats.

This looks bonkers to me! Why would you focus more on the disquiet if the quiet is what you want?

I remember telling one client who was habitually staring at the trains of thought and trying, mostly in vain, to catch the space between cars as they went whizzing by, why don't you just look up? There is a whole wide blue sky up there. You aren't the train. You are the blue sky.

The look of wonder on his face was contagious. He slowly said "Oh my God! I had no idea."

He just didn't know that you don’t have to focus on, think about, fix or resolve thoughts or thinking. It really never actually stops and in looking at it and engaging with it, you never leave that busy world.

What we can do is look up, look away, look deeper. For some people, the change is in seeing that they don't actually have to resolve or engage with each thought. Just let it be. Don't touch it. Don't pick it up. Just because it popped in your head doesn't mean it has any power over you. It's up to you where to look.

My big insight around this was that at all times "a quiet mind" and "a busy mind" co-exist. Take your attention off one and the other one grows. Or said differently whichever one you give attention to will flourish and the other diminishes until it seems to hardly exist at all.

This kind of hit me in the face one evening when I was listening to an audio recording of Sydney Banks, the Canadian-Scottish philosopher-mystic who first articulated the three principles of life. He said, "Look for the silence, what everyone seeks is silence." And in other places, he constantly says to look for a quiet mind.

He never says to quiet your mind or to stop your thinking. Simply go looking for the quiet that already and always exists because it's an inherent inborn aspect of who we are.

Listen to the silence.

If you feel like there is no silence ever, then give it longer. It takes a bit of time for the shift from busy attention to silent or quiet attention to kick in. I promise you it will, if you actually look for quiet.

In the silence before all creation with Thought is peace, true rest and healing, contentment, love, intuitive knowing, and pretty much everything you've ever imagined you'd want.

Podcasts, Podcasts, Podcasts!

I've been busy recording podcasts!

I was a guest on the wonderful Stephanie Benedetto's podcast "Wildspire". Her business is The Awakened Business. We will have a link to listen to this one soon, it's not yet released.

I will be a guest tomorrow afternoon on the estimable Rob Cook's podcast "We're Listening" talking about deep listening and The Listening World Summit coming up in Prague May 24-26. The conference is free online and is going to be stellar. I'll post the link on Instagram as soon as we get it.

And each week I get together with Dr. Kathleen Perry, my friend, acupuncturist and transformative coach out of Texas and we talk all things life. It's called "We Go Deep with Kat and Sara". Listen here: https://open.spotify.com/show/6Db97oHb2QWoyyF9OUd8Y3?si=fc9b303c8959437e

With Love,
Sara Joy

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