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Creating Bridges: Spirituality & Philosophy: The Awakening Generation
On Silence and Motion
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by Ann Marie Judge |
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In the past month, life has been too fast. (I'm sure there are a few nods of agreement going on at this point.) Thanks to the holidays—which, I was once lead to believe were a relaxing time, full of family and lights and warm, fuzzy things—I was sucking fumes, running on empty. I was rushing, terrified in motion. At the end of every day, I was sick. I was sick with the spinning of life, the endless exhausting rotations, the dizzying orbit of the marching days. It's the childhood spinning in the air, falling on the ground, staring up at the sky, and feeling like you're still falling into the circling, no ground beneath you.
I knew something had to happen, something had to be cleared out. I'm not one to go on living feeling like a coffee filter percolated over one too many times. So I wrote it out, spit it out as I so often must.
Motion Sickness
To perceive and to feel the motion, to move with the quickness, the rushing, is easy. It is what we were trained, raised, schooled to do. “To move as fast as thought, to write as fast as speech, to hear as fast as the teacher can preach.”
To outrun our lessons and be the first to get to the finish line with a vast inheritance and a stomach full of ice cream, to display as many plaques of achievement on our office walls; how much did you do today? How many errands did you run? How many things did you buy? How much screaming did you pack in? Did you win at sardines this afternoon, or did the other soccer moms overtake you for the moment? Did you pack your van with more groceries than last week?
How many children did you save? How many souls did you pass on the roadway of life?
“How many breaths did you take? How many earths did you shake? How many hearts did you break?” How many blinks, sneezes, tears, laughs made up your day?
And how much did you overlook?
How many smiles from strangers did you miss? How many cries for love were drowned out by the yelling in your head? How many hidden turns down into blissful gardens did you pass in your haste?
All our motion is hell-bent in overtaking one another. It's hectic, the sound no more than static through the receiver. No perceptible thoughts or growth can come through.
“To outrun even the road...” To move faster than life can carry you... To move faster than the wind that's trying to lead you... That's what we're taught to do. Think faster than your mentors, reach the punchline before the joke is finished... To run, run so hard and so fast, that the road disappears beneath your feet and you are falling... “To travel beyond the road...”
One of my mentors once explained to me that the reason for my constant motion sickness was due to the fact that I was moving faster than I myself could move and think and be.
If that's the case, that explains a lot about life.
Silence
“To perceive the lack of motion, to live in the silence, to learn from the white spaces between the lines, the rests between the notes, the glances and the inhales before the words and the kisses and the running...”
We were never taught how to do that. It is called “laziness,” “lethargy,” “selfishness.” To sit and be and breathe amidst a world that is always sprinting and screaming over oceans and fields and shopping malls and life is not a behavior our society encourages.
And yet, it is a stronger person that can sit still in the middle of the road than the one who tries to outrun it.
To sit and be, without outside stimulus and input is something few people can do for more than a few minutes before the TV switches on, the music gets turned up, the conversation emerges again from the awkward pause. We believe that there is nothing to learn, nothing to gain from stillness and silence.
There's a line from a song that's been stuck in my head for a while now: “Why are you so petrified of silence? Here, can you handle this?... (The song stops... Then, it starts again.) Did you think about your bills? Your ex? Your deadlines? Or when you think you're gonna die? Or did you long for the next distraction?”
Because we were trained to learn and to live in constant motion, even when we are still, our minds are still screaming ahead of us. It's no wonder ADD and ADHD are so rampant: they have to be!
To sit and just be carries with it some interesting dilemmas. Not the least of which is the fact that, when you do sit down to enjoy a moment, not only do the shopping and to-do lists and the shoulda-woulda-coulda thoughts come in, but something below the surface bubbles up: insecurity.
To sit and not try to change anything would mean that not only can you not change the world around you, but you also have to accept yourself where you are at, wherever you may be. That means to both take responsibility for the exact spot you are and to accept that it is right and perfect just as it is.
The Challenge for a New Year
Silence and motion work hand-in-hand: it is important to realize that, as in any manifestation of duality, they are two halves of the same whole. And in that, motion can be beautiful. But our world is not a place of balance at present, and this duality is a microcosm of that macrocosm, so to speak. Right now, we are in motion in a big, big way. We are going so fast that motion is in control of all, the role of silence all but forgotten.
Now, as we enter into a new year, resolutions are being made. Diets, wishes for more gain, more recognition, more ability, resolutions to change one's behaviors, breaking old patterns and habits; stop this, do that, read this, eat that, mend this, nurture that, awaken this, silence that...
The challenge is this: before you decide on quitting cold turkey, marching into work, demanding a raise, and selling all your possessions to move to Alaska, sit! Stop! Just stop. Breathe. Feel. Be. Break the endless chain of the running days and remind yourself of who you are before you write one more list of things you “have always wanted to do.” If something is not happening for you, go inside and inquire. Or, if you have a faith, meditate or pray.
There is little real magic in a new year changing; yes, the energies change, but as my mother always scolds me, no matter how much you desire something, if you don't actually believe that it will happen for you, “the Universe can't buck that!” If you don't believe you deserve something, no amount of lists or resolutions will bring it about.
That's where the silence comes in. Take time to take stock of your life. That's what the cold and the winter is all about; it is the death before the rebirth, the inhale before mother nature decides to exhale her warm breath back upon the earth. You can only exhale for so long, after all.
Then and only then, when you have remembered who you are, when you have loved yourself without moving to change something, when you have sat in silence and listened to whatever voices have been trying to speak to you—whether it be your own inner voice or that of the Universe in its infinite manifestations—then, you can begin to move.
Once you have allowed the silence to become the teacher, everything that moves at all becomes one hundred times more potent. It's like cutting sugar out of your diet for a week; when the week is up and you bite into your favorite candy bar, you feel as if you're eating pure sugar. Then, you can eat an apple and be overwhelmed by the perfect sweetness of it. You have become sensitive to life.
Take care to protect yourself in your newfound innocence at life. When you return to this state, it's a bit like becoming an infant again, and things more easily bombard your senses. But it is easy to keep yourself healthy once you're started again at healthy. Energetically, simply surround yourself with love, ask that only what is right for you to permeate your energy.
Once you've taken responsibility for what you are in the moment and then let it go, you then have the ability to manifest what you desire, simply because you are still, and in that, you are in touch with what is right for you. You realize that what you desire already is yours, has always been yours; all you had to do was to believe it was possible.
Now, your motion has become the divine motion born of a pregnant silence. The inhale is as important as the exhale, all is in balance. Instead of trying to force things in and out of existence, you are allowing your own divine will and the will of the Universe to move through you.
You will now begin to see that life exists on more levels than you ever dreamed of, that the grandest brush strokes of life are echoed in the tiniest sounds and flourishes. Everything becomes a teacher and a messenger of the divine.
In short, it is the challenge of the new year to breathe. Remember breathing?
Slowly now... In... Out... In... Out...
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Ann Marie Judge
Crystal Child, Student of Life, Spirituality, & Writer
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Ann Marie graduated from high school in 2005. She attended Beloit College in Wisconsin for her freshman year of college and will be attending the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in the spring of 2007 for photography.
Not yet old enough for acronyms at the end of her name, she considers herself a student of life, and has been deeply involved in the spiritual community since her first awakening at the age of twelve. Since then, she has had much education in the metaphysical and spiritual arts by a wide variety of teachers and healers. She was very quickly recognized as a Crystal and Indigo child, as well as a clairvoyant and intuitive.
Because she was able to begin living for the spiritual at a young age, her dream is to reach out through her writing to other young people that are experiencing similar awakenings while still being within the educational system and a society that often does not recognize or nurture young, spiritually-gifted ones. Her vision is to form a community of spiritually-minded young people so that the younger generations will be prepared to be guides and teachers as the spiritual consciousness of the world continues to rise.
Though much of her life is still largely potential, she feels this time in her life is the first step in fulfilling her dream of becoming a published writer so as to serve the children and young people of the world that feel the spiritual stirring within. As well, she hopes to educate parents on how to nurture and understand what is going on in their children's minds from a young person's perspective.
Visit her website at
www.RandomActsof
Literacy.com
to read her works, view
her art, and gain insight into the spiritual experiences of an Awakened young person."
Find the forums at
www.RandomActsof
Literacy.com/forums, as well as a link to it on the navigation of the RAOL homepage.
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