53: The Sweet Sound of Silence (Part 1)

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What's Next? This is a question we're all having to ask and answer more frequently. I'm Jenny Blake, your host of the Pivot Podcast and author of Pivot. The only move that matters is your next one.

For show notes from this episode, visit pivotmethod.com podcast if Change is the only constant, then let's get better at it. Here we go.

Hello favorite friends. I hope this podcast finds you well in what can often be a frenzied time of year. I am recording this today on a snowy New York Saturday. Being from California when it snows, I still feel as giddy as a little kid because it's so rare and I just love it. There's nothing better than curling up with a book and and some tea and sitting watching snowfall. So wherever you are, maybe you can envision snow even if you're not in a place that actually gets it. And I am doing a little jig over here before recording this podcast on the subject of kind of crazy times in life and the juxtaposition of this amazing calm and silence that is always available to us. Today's topic is part one of an episode that I'm doing solo called Sweet Sound of Silence and it's leading up to my choice to do a silent meditation retreat over New Year's. So it's a five day silent retreat. I've never done one before. I used to be really intimidated by this concept of not talking for five days. But I have to say, after launching Pivot and working so hard for not just one year, but five years since I left Google of trying to get my business off the ground and writing this next book, I have been craving silence lately. And so now going into this retreat actually feels quite joyful and curious. I'm really wondering what it's going to be like. So I decided to record part one of my experience with silence and how I'm finding it in my day to day life now and then I'll do part two sometime after I get back. But before we jump into today's episode, I want to invite you to join us for momentum as a way to really powerfully kick off the new year. Even if you just joined for one quarter. It's $97. You'll get to my entire course library, everything I've ever created. In addition to bi weekly Q and A calls, we have some awesome upcoming workshops to help you round out 2016 and really kick off 2017 with a bang, including planning your 2017 pivot, how to lead a Pivot mastermind group with your friend tours scalable streams of solopreneur income, crafting your career vision with one of our amazing Pivot coaches, Lisa Lewis and in March, soul goals, how to align with your inner blueprint. If you're a little bit on the fence and you want to get a feel for what momentum is like, and I'll say it's a community of about 70 us. 70 of us. So a really nice tight knit group and if you want to get a feel for momentum, I invite you to listen to one of the recent Q and A calls that I did. I covered why if then statements are problematic, Dropping attachments and wants how to get a book to take off and let it find its own way in the world. How to harness your superpowers toward your one year vision, how to listen to your gut and have tough conversations around it, what to do when new business ideas strike, and figuring out launch timing when you're ready to take the leap. So if you want to listen to that Q and A call and all the goodness that I packed into it, just head over to pivotmethod.com momentum preview and if you know that it sounds like a fit and you want to join us, head on over to pivotmethod.com Momentum.

All right, so back to our show on Silence right now, whatever you're doing, I know a lot of people listen to podcasts as a secondary activity while walking, driving, commuting, swimming, who knows what? If you can, I invite you to close your eyes and if you are driving, then keep your eyes open of course and join us for the breathing. So we're just gonna take a moment here to get centered. Everybody go ahead and feel a really straight spine, whether you're sitting or walking. Crown of your head reaching up toward the sky, chin tucked slightly in and back. If you can close your eyes, I invite you to do so. Notice any tension around your jaw, any tightness around your forehead and the muscles of your eyes and release it.

Taking a nice slow, deep inhale in through the nose.

And a loud sighing. Ah. As you Release any stress and tension from your day. You can even shake out your hands and wrists as you do this. So let's take two more just like that. Take a nice deep inhale in through the nose.

And releasing any stress or tension. One more just like that. Nice deep inhale in through the nose.

Keeping your eyes closed if you can.

Relaxing all the tiny muscles around your eyes and your forehead and your jaw.

Noticing any shifts you experience already just from those few breaths.

And now we'll do one short round of controlled breathing. So counting to three on the inhale, inhale for 1, 2, 3. Hold.

Slowly exhaling through the nose. 3, 2, 1. Hold.

A little bit longer this round, inhaling for the count of 1, 2, 3, 4. Hold.

Exhaling evenly through the nose. 4, 3, 2, 1. Hold.

Last round, nice and steady to 5. Inhale, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5. Hold.

Exhaling through the nose. 5, 4, 3, 2, 1.

Letting your breath return to normal. Keeping your eyes closed. If you can just take a moment to feel this experience in your body.

Right there in that moment is a little pocket of silence. No matter what noises are going around outside of you in your environment, on the inside, you are held in this beautiful robust blanket of silence.

It's been so powerful for me as I have felt the need to rest and recharge after launching the book to really deepen my meditation practice. And I've been doing 30 minutes in the morning, sometimes 45, and then when I can, 30 minutes in the evening. And the more used to this practice I get, it's been almost five years now of a daily practice and I'm a just 15 days away from my 365 day streak. And it is cumulative, it is like a muscle. And this ability to sit in silence is awe inspiring to me. Not the ability, but the gift that is silence. That for just a few moments, a few minutes, or if you're lucky, 30 minutes or more, you can be at peace. That no matter what is going on, you have this little pocket that you can sink into and find within yourself. And that I have been able to find within myself. And it's this safe space to let in whatever wants to come in. It's not that this feeling of silence always has happy emotions or sad emotions, but it's a safe place to let it all in. And while I think that music and guided meditation is wonderful, and definitely it works great for some people, I invite you to experience experiment with silence. If you haven't yet. And although it can be a little uncomfortable, especially if you feel like you have a jumpy mind. Just notice. I really don't believe there's any right or wrong way to meditate. And even if you don't want to call it meditation, can you create a small pocket of silence for yourself, even if it's one minute? The controlled breathing that we did was very short. Even that, you can start to notice a shift in the body as your body relaxes into its parasites, parasympathetic nervous system, rest and digest mode. Breath is a fascinating thing. It is both voluntary and involuntary. The only bodily function that is both of those things. And when we can slow our breathing and relax tension in our body, there's this beautiful silence that we can tap into. I just started reading a book called Falling Into Grace. And I'm only one chapter in, so I can't vouch for the whole thing. It's by Adyashanti. But I do want to read you this excerpt. Excerpt that he talks about in the beginning. And it's in a section called Coming out of the Matrix of Suffering. He says, to begin with, we have to make a simple yet very powerful observation. All thoughts, good thoughts, bad thoughts, lovely thoughts, evil thoughts, occur within something. All thoughts arise and disappear into a vast space. If you watch your mind, you'll see that a thought simply occurs on its own. It arises without any intention on your part. In response to this, we're taught to grab and identify with them. But if we can just for a moment relinquish this anxious tendency to grab our thoughts, we begin to notice something very profound. That thoughts arise and play out spontaneously and on their own within a vast space. The noisy mind actually occurs within a very, very deep sense of quiet.

It's about beginning to notice that there is a silence that is always present. And that noise happens within this silence, even the noise of the mind. You can start to see that every thought arises against the backdrop of absolute silence.

And then in a section called the Great Internal Space, he says, what do you find when you look underneath the veil of your thoughts? What do you really find when you open up to something beyond your mind? What happens when you become still and you inquire, without just jumping at the next thought, quietly ask, what am I really? Isn't that moment absolute stillness? And aren't you completely aware of that stillness? And isn't it obvious that if we don't go to our minds that what we are is something spacious and of amazing mystery, amazing wonder, that we are a still, quiet point of awareness and consciousness?

When we stop and we look what's obvious is that there's just the looking, an open space of awareness and nothing more because the next thing is simply the next thought.

I really love those passages and it's been my experience too that the silence is available that if we can I've shared on a previous podcast my analogy of there's a beehive in our brain and all the thoughts are buzzing around like bees. And I picture a lake, a calm body of water at my heart center. And when I recognize that my mind is kind of going crazy like the beehive, I say to myself, mind like water drop. And I picture relaxing my mind and dropping into the calm waters at my heart center and being and noticing the silence around me.

I also shared and there's also I did a previous podcast called How Meditation Rewired My Brain and five Tips to Make the Habit Stick because I share all of this as one of the things that has worked the best in my life to find a place of calm, quiet sanity. For so long I have struggled with a very overactive mind, the same mind that wants to write a book. When I sought out to write my first book, it was the same mind that was full of anxiety and worry and people pleasing and very sensitive. I would I'm a highly sensitive person and relationships were always so challenging for me and just to go through the day was a struggle a lot of the time, and I didn't realize how much until I've been on the other side of it until the last few years. And I do credit so much of this to a daily meditation practice of helping me find this quiet, calm center. And so when I look back on the way that my mind used to be, I don't know how I did it. I don't know how I dealt with it because I never thought this level of quiet and peace on the other side was even possible. To the point where now every day that I'm blessed to have that has this quality to it, I feel gifted beyond measure. It's so happy to me. It's like heaven every day just to exist in a mind that can be this calm compared to what I was so used to growing up for so much of my life. So I shared on a previous podcast that for a few weeks there, my soul or body, who knows, started dropping haikus down while I was meditating. And there are two that I wanted to read to you on the topic of silence. The first, delicious robust silence, beauty infinite, always within reach.

And the second harmony is space, so each soul can dance to the rhythm of their own heart.

My daily practice has been to wake up, have tea, do some nonfiction reading, but of any book that feels like it's elevating my soul, my spirit. So there's a certain vibration of book that I've been attracted to recently that it's not just anything. I'm not reading the newspaper, I'm not reading media, I'm not reading about violence or even the level of people's personal stories unless it's told on a really kind of a. I don't know, it doesn't have to be calm and peaceful, but something that inspires those feelings within me. So I start the day, haven't looked at my phone and I don't look at my phone until I'm done with all these morning routines. Then I do sit for 30 minutes in meditation. When I'm done with that, I come out of it. And part of that meditation, sometimes I'll do about 10 minutes of pranayama or breathing exercises like we did at the beginning of this podcast. And I feel, I find that when, especially when I have a very active mind, if I do pranayama exercises, that really takes me into my body, calms me down and helps quiet the mind. And sometimes in meditation I will pose a question. I'll either surrender some area of my life that is challenging and just say, I turn this over, show me the way, show me the next step, something I learned from Tosha Silver, or I'll ask a question, is there anything I should know about X or Y or posing an open ended question of something I've been thinking about. And sometimes I'll just visualize and just think I'm open to what drops into my awareness. And I often tell people so sometimes if you're going to use this to frame up a tough decision, it's just so important to notice when the mind is chewing on that decision intellectually versus an immediate calm felt sense in the body about an instinct or intuition. And that to me, when I, you know, when I'm not just trying to relax the thoughts, if I'm doing something with intention, like asking a question, I'm going for the immediate intuitive felt sense, not the mental chewing like a chew toy that can so often happen in the rest of our day.

And then after I meditate, I journal. And sometimes the journaling, you know, it's this is what happened today or here's how I'm feeling. And lately it's been a really fun practice to write soul letters to self. And I started doing this, I read a few different Books. Penny Pierce, who I've one of my favorite Pivot podcast guests and now a friend. She talks about direct writing in her books Frequency and Leap of Perception and even her first book, the Intuitive Way. And then there's a book called writing down youn SOU. 100% recommend was good. It sparked me to do this. But the point of this exercise is to write from something, whether you want to call it your highest self, your soul, the part of you that already knows the answers. And so every day I've been trying to at least or every couple days write a soul letter to self that.

I don't censor. I don't censor, and I'm really trying to channel it from my highest self or this greater wisdom within. Been interesting about them is that they don't give a lot of details. It's never about specific things. It's just kind of a higher or more generalized message. And one of the things people recommend when you do this kind of direct or soul writing is not to even read what you wrote immediately afterward. Wait a couple days and you might be surprised when you go back to say, I wrote that. That came from me, or oh my goodness, that is such amazing advice. Or that is exactly what I needed to hear. And it can be really fascinating. And so another thing, I've been trying to write these. Whether I'm feeling happy, sad, sometimes I don't know what to write and I just whatever topic first drops into my mind. And again, the important thing is not to censor yourself, but this can be a way, once you have calmed your mind in meditation, to tap into a really good wise part of your inner self and see what emerges. So on that note, I will close this solo riff podcast on one of my soul letters to self. This is from December 1st.

I am thirsty for silence. And in this moment I am rich with it. This is wealth. A nurturing, peaceful home environment, New York skyline that I love, and the time and space to rest in the robust silence with a quiet mind. This is it. This is wealth. Can you feel how rich you are with the present moment? All is well. There is so much to be grateful for. Bliss is what this is. Total unfettered bliss. It's the bliss of a body and mind at rest. What sweeter silence is there? Fully contained and yet fully open to the world around you. There's no need to shut down to anyone or anything because you are at home in yourself. You are the cashmere sweater, the comfy couch, the fuzzy socks, the hot cup of tea, the crackling fireplace, the majestic city skyline. A life with this much space and silence is rich beyond measure. Feel the peace and grace emanating from every cell non doing heaven on earth Love soul.

So with that I send you all love and blessings and that you are able to find even the tiniest pockets of silence within your days. And even if it starts with one minute or five minutes, sink into it and savor it. Thank you all so much for being here and for listening. And if you try any of these practices, I would love to hear how it goes. So either send me an email or join us again at Momentum, this amazing community for side hustlers and solopreneurs. We would absolutely love to have you. And Again, that's@pivotmethod.com Momentum thanks so much everybody. Bye.

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Remember, build first, then your courage will follow. Hasn't it always.