Free friend!

Silence is something I am passionate about because I believe here is wherein lies the essence of life, hence the name of my book “AGAPE The Essence of Life” …Agape from the Greek means unconditional love.

Silence is delicious. It is an integrated haven like SPA for the soul. Silence is our biggest ally and best friend that keeps our secrets, helps us be more aware of things, helps us make better choices and what is most important is that it is always there when we need it the most.

We would be crazy not to want to look for or accept a best friend like this one. And in this world where everything is about money, this amazing experience of a best friend is free!

We can escape into silence at any moment. It helps us retrieve from this noisy world to help us stay grounded, otherwise we run the risk of getting lost in the whirlpool of life. For this luxury to come to pass we need to know what silence is, where and how we find it.

We would become millionaires selling spaces full of delicious silence, except few people know what silence means or what it feels like. Such a space is only a balm to those that know how to appreciate it. Very few seek silence because they do not know what to do with it. Most people are terrified when they get to experience a few minutes of silence, with company or by themselves. People have come accustomed to noise and distractors galore wherein silence has no room. My kids, 25 and 22, were born in this noisy era, none of them have gone to bed without music, TV or looking incessantly at the cell phone for distractors.

Silence is beyond the auditory or the visual though, it is also tactile or gustatory. I can only imagine that a deaf or blind person also finds a lot of noise in life. To experience real silence and practice contemplation we need absolute sensory stillness only found in awareness. Pure silence allows us to experience our thoughts, emotions, and feelings but only if we make this a conscious practice of being aware. Only then is it possible to enjoy the SPA experience in silence amid a noisy world.

We can find silence anywhere if we are mindful. This latter is a very modern overused word. For those that are not yet clear of its meaning, the Oxford dictionary explains it as: a mental state achieved by focusing one’s awareness on the present moment, while calmly acknowledging and accepting one’s feelings, thoughts, and bodily sensations.

Even in a monastery, or that deaf person, will not find peace in silence if the mind has a lot of noisy thoughts. This bombarding of thoughts will consequently affect our feelings and body, and they will in turn affect the mind as they are all interconnected, feeding of each other. The first thing that needs to be silenced is our mind, so our emotions and body can find peace, and we can only get this by becoming aware and practicing mindfulness. We silence our mind by noticing our every thought and monitoring unfounded thinking…that is a start.

We are so used to looking for everything outside of ourselves that it is here where we begin searching for silence. We are looking in the wrong place. Silence is only found in our sacred place within us. Even if we could pay that expensive getaway seeking for a moment of peace away from distractors and noise, we better make sure our mind already found peace in silence prior to our trip so we can really appreciate this balm. Otherwise, we are only moving our whirlpool with us to a nicer looking place. We will never find the peace in silence but within us. Inner silence is our best friend!