Welcome,
Friends.
Today,
Let's center ourselves in conscious awareness and experience silence as a quality of presence.
First,
Find your comfortable position,
Upright but not tense,
Erect and tall.
Take a couple of comfortable breaths and allow your body to soften.
Now,
Intentionally,
Take a deep,
Slow breath in and hold.
And as you release,
Allow your sense of awareness to pull beneath the crown of the head and rest.
Take another deep,
Slow breath in and hold.
And as you release,
Allow that sense of awareness to pull down the center of the brain and the brain stem to the top of the back of the neck and rest.
Another deep,
Slow breath in and hold.
And as you release,
Allow your awareness to pull down the spine to the area behind the heart and rest.
Another deep,
Slow breath in and hold.
As you release,
Allow your awareness to move down the spine to pull in the tailbone and rest.
Take another four breaths on your own,
Holding at the top.
And as you release,
Allow your awareness to center beneath the crown of the head and then down the spine incrementally to pull in the tailbone.
Take about a minute.
Welcome back.
Now,
From this centered position,
Let's explore one quality of presence,
Silence.
Having stepped back from the thinking mind,
We have stepped out of the noise of busy thinking.
And in so doing,
We have stepped back into the vast pool of silence that is everywhere in presence.
Take a deep,
Slow breath in.
Hold.
And on the release,
Allow your awareness to acknowledge the deep silence that is present beneath all the sounds of the world.
Simply be with the presence of that silence.
You'll notice that the silence is not the absence of sound,
But has a presence in its own right.
Immanuel Kant,
In the 18th century,
Developed his categories of thought,
Which names the kinds of thinking that make up all thought,
Not things to be thought about,
But the stuff we think with.
He developed 12 categories of thought,
But two of them he posited as fundamental to all others,
Time and space.
Prior to any other kind of thinking,
Such as determining quantity or quality,
Time and space are already there.
We cannot think outside of those.
Similarly,
In conscious awareness,
When we step back from the thinking mind,
We step into silence.
Silence is a fundamental aspect of being as we experience it.
All sounds arise into silence and then fall away.
And yet the silence remains.
We cannot step back from silence.
Being awake means awakening from the identification with sound,
Especially the sound of our own thinking mind,
To being one with and in silence.
Even in our busy day,
We can practice awareness of silence even as we listen to others,
Even as we experience our own speech.
Beneath all the sounds,
All the noise of our world,
Lies a profound silence which,
If we are attuned to it,
Can help ground us in being.
Let's take a few moments in intentional being,
Breathing in deeply and slowly,
And luxuriating in the silence of being.
Thanks for joining me today.
I hope you have a beautiful day.
