Expand Each Moment – Embracing Silence

Close your eyes for 3 or 4 seconds and listen to your surroundings, how many distinct sounds do you hear? I’ll bet you counted more then a handful. We are surrounded by noise, most of which we are barely conscious of and we’ve come to accept our life bereft of silence and forgotten how important embracing silence is.

The noise of passing cars, scraping snow shovels, clicking keys and muffled smart phones while important to our serenity is not the noise I want you to think about. No, I want you to think about the noise inside your head that’s shouting to get out. It’s our thoughts and internal conversations constantly taking place inside all of us that gets in the way of meaningful Dialogue.

You might be surprised at the amount of words and pictures that cycle though your mind each second, and how much of this constant stream of inner conversation is just below your level of awareness. We think all the time and without a practice like meditation or simple mindfulness we’ll never know what’s going on below our awareness. However, when we dedicate even a small amount of time each day to a mindfulness practice we can start to see what’s going on in our own minds.

Once we start observing what’s happening in our own minds we will start to notice the silence that resides between our thoughts. With practice we can take the silence between our thoughts and expand and nurture it into deep moments of creativity and understanding. The more we expand the silence the easier we’ll find it is to listen and understand what others are sharing with us in Dialogue and in everyday life.

Before the thought of adding something new to your life sends you fleeing for safety stop for just a moment, and let me assure you that as little as 10 minutes a day (to start) will produce tangible benefits in your life.

Below I’ve created a list of blog posts and articles that delve deeper into embracing silence, the links will lead you to not only to tips but also to some very thoughtful writing on silence itself.

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