Within each of us is a silence as vast as the universe. And when we experience that silence, we remember who we are. Gunilla Norris.
I am a great lover of silence, the kind of idiot regularly found ‘shh-ing’ even the staff in my local library. Its increasing marginalisation feels like a huge loss to our society, particularly in city life where less and less of it is available to us and so much of the noise we are exposed to is beyond our control. But what does it have to do with yoga and why is it so essential to life today? Some years back I found myself unable to shift a restlessness that permeated my being. Naturally, I cited an excess of people and external noise as the major factors in my state of agitation and became increasingly solitary. But just below the surface there remained a scratchy irritation that seemingly no amount of being alone would dissipate and very soon (by which I mean millennia later) dawned the realisation that the issue was not the rest of the world but in fact my very own ‘internal noise’ - wave after wave of unchecked emotion and incessant thought louder than any decibel known to man.
Undoubtedly our thinking minds and emotions are an integral, sometimes astonishingly beautiful part of this human experience. Often dismissed respectively as unenlightened or primitive, in my view they are neither. They hold vast fields of sophisticated information that can enhance our lives and connect us with others, if only we take the time to really check in and listen to them rather than being swept along by their tide. Back in 2012, the dawn of the much-lauded Aquarian Age, I remember the excitement around a new age of expanding emotion, with the added potential for people to express those feelings more fully: Joy! What could possibly go wrong? Cut to 2018 and it transpires that being in touch with your emotions in no way equates to knowing how to navigate or communicate them in a conscious, compassionate manner. That man in the White House dividing nations Tweet by Tweet? Definitely a man with no problem expressing his every thought and emotion. Does he to know how to manage either accordingly? It would appear not. The trick, it would seem, is to know when to ‘bring the noise’ and when and how to turn it down, so life might feel less like we’re bouncing from the walls of every energetic high and catastrophic low and more like we’re consciously choosing how we construct meaning from what is happening both inside and outside of us.
So upon noticing my unruly inner landscape, I decided to go about fixing it. I sat myself in lotus, emptied my mind and silently meditated my way to euphoric states of unreserved bliss….said no one, ever. In real life, I attempted all of the above, got no further than noticing my thoughts and added to them ‘Ok. So I am MAD...’ and this is where the yoga came in. Honestly, I started yoga, specifically asana, because it seemed like the next best thing for someone who found even sitting still inordinately difficult and frankly mind-numbingly dull. I detested my first class but thankfully had enough insight to stick with it, not least because despite finding it challenging and repetitive, the yoga annoyed me less than I was annoying myself – just. Eventually, however, it was in that very repetition, of class after class and asana after asana, there came the odd glimpse of these physical sequences as palpable access points to mental and emotional calm. Through synchronised breathing and movement with fellow students came brief respite from that sea of thinking and in its wake sprang interludes of deep stillness and mental and physical space. And, of course, the more you listen in that silence, the more of value there is to hear.
Our practice holds great potential as a bridge between the automatic every day and a more conscious, contemplative and peaceful state of being, way beyond that of attempted naval gazing or complete withdrawal from the outside world. It invites constant enquiry and requires that the practitioner pay alert but gentle attention in order establish what is true for them on a moment to moment basis; to listen and accept, or to react and modify accordingly, with kindness and forgiveness. On and off the mat these are invaluable skills, particularly in a world where so much of our identity is influenced by other people’s thoughts of us or cultural and societal expectation. In these increasingly noisy times, silence and listening are real-life super powers. To pause and actually hear what someone is saying without just waiting impatiently to say your piece – to take a breath before you respond, no matter how emotionally charged you are, now that’s a worthwhile skill. To really listen when your own body speaks to you, particularly if the message is something you’d rather not hear or contrary to a story you’ve been telling yourself for years. And to stop when it’s quite literally crying out for you to do so, even when that feels like a crushing defeat. It turns out that another field of information available to us is the physical body itself and the key to this knowledge is the practice of yoga. The body knows, and often it knows better than the mind because it can bypass the burden of expectation more readily. But like all living things, it needs constant care and attention. It has its own unique message delivery system that will call to you when it needs you to check back in. Ignore it time and time again and its pain may well become your greatest teacher.
There are so few places we can go for quiet listening and a shared experience that doesn’t require us to offer or be offered an opinion. These places are essential to bonding us as humans. They transcend the chasm of our perceived differences. There are even fewer spaces where so much can be communicated so silently. One unimaginably vast field exists within each of us. Its song can heard in class through the sound of our unified breath, this beautiful, completely impartial vehicle of information we all share. It’s on the mat that we witness and ‘remember who we are’. If the word vinyasa means to ‘place in a special way’ then the essence of our practice might be that we cultivate the ability to place not just our bodies but also our thoughts and attention in a special way. Not so we can go about fixing those despised recesses of ourselves, but to allow them the space to co-exist beside the parts of us we like a little more, and in doing so to grant others the space to truly be themselves. To navigate this human experience with bravery, integrity and deep compassion for the vulnerability of ourselves and those around us. And finally, to remember, often, that our default tides of unconscious thought and unchecked ‘noise’ profoundly affect our days. Days that turn into years, that subsequently flow into this all too fleeting, sometimes graceful, often wobbly sequence we call life.
Bibliography: Inviting Silence, Gunilla Norris. Yoga: The Spirit & Practice of Moving Into Stillness, Eric Schiffman. This is Water, David Foster Wallace