When everything began to fall apart- to really fall apart- I intuitively knew that it was time that I learned how to be still.
The first real signal from my heart/soul/consciousness that NOW IS THE TIME came shortly after the breakup. I used to listen to music routinely throughout the day. Every time I got in the car it was on, and at night I’d listen as a way to drown out my tinnitus before falling asleep. Suddenly, I could not listen to music- ANY music- because of the deep, searing pain that it would cause. I found myself driving in silence, glad for the time to be alone away from my children and conversation, allowed to feel whatever I needed to feel, with only the small chance another driver might see me looking forlorn and tear-stained. No one I knew would see me and ask questions, thank goodness.
Eventually music would come back in to my days, but the desire to learn how to be still remained. What does this look like? How does one go about “learning how to be still”?
True to form, because of my over-analytical nature, I had to research this first. In fact, I spent countless hours researching this subject, many more hours than I have spent meditating or taking walks in silence or doing anything without somehow splitting my focus. If I was washing the dishes, I was also listening to a podcast about something – how to heal from a breakup, how to meditate, etc. But at some point you have to stop studying and you have to start doing. At some point you have to stop avoiding being with yourself and you just have to do it. And so I did.
At first it felt strange, like I was wasting time. There were so many more important things I could be doing with my time, and my mind felt the need to remind me. I was determined though, as if something more fundamental than my mind was making this request of me now. The chaos inside of me seemingly had it’s own life sustaining energy, but something else was pulling me in a different direction. A direction I had never tried going before, one that intrigued me. What was down this road I was embarking on?
Now that I’ve made these changes to my routine and they’ve become habit, I am getting used to the space. The voice inside of me that used to cry out “You are not done!” “Don’t forget to do this!” “You need to clean that!” and the penultimate “You are not enough!” is much quieter now. Perhaps it is still there, but it holds much less sway than it used to have.
All of those past behaviors feel like a madness now- a compulsion. Listening to that voice every time it summoned me, as if I was possessed. At the least, it was a compulsion to stay busy enough that the even more destructive voices stay pushed down. A compulsion to run away from the silence, because what dark voices or emotions would emerge if I gave them the space to come up?
Spoiler- there were no dark voices that emerged. There were some emotions that I needed to feel, but they were nowhere near as scary as my mind had made them out to be.
As I sit here writing this, I’m enjoying the sound of birds singing outside my window, and I know that this new way of being will remain with me until I die. I am pulled into the present moment, reluctant to let my mind resurrect the ghosts of the past or to conjure up catastrophic monsters looming in the future. Right now, in this moment, I am fine. I am safe, my children are safe, my dogs are safe, and I am happy. My career is going well, and the only person that I need to be “enough” for is me. I am enough, and the present moment is abundant.
