Hi, welcome back to your Daily Mindfulness. In today's session, we're going to talk about the wisdom of silence. So there's a great quote by Pink that says, "The quiet, it scares me cause it screams the truth." The quiet scares me cause it screams the truth. Really take that one in for a moment and just notice how it lands for you. Is there anything in that that resonates? I know it certainly resonates for me and resonated even more at a different point in my life before I got into meditation.

I remember this feeling of if my, if I let my mind get too still, or I spent too much time just with myself, I didn't know what would arise, but there was this sense of something uncomfortable being in that space. It was almost scary to be with myself. And I associated a sense of, of quiet, of stillness, silence with having to go into that territory. And I think this tends to be true for a lot of people. And it's one of the reasons a lot of people might avoid something like a meditation practice, where we are being still, we are being quiet we are dropping into a certain kind of silence that actually invites us to meet the truth of what is here.

And that's one of the reasons why I say we can find a certain kind of wisdom in silence, because if there's something that is happening beneath the surface that we haven't been addressing, some sort of truth that we've been denying, some reality that feels hard to face or something that we need to accept within ourselves, well, when we do get still and we do get quiet, if that is beneath the surface, that is what we will hear. That is what we will see. Now this could be a potential reason to never get quiet and just keep running. But I think if you're listening to this, chances are you have a sense of what that pattern tends to lead to. We just get more disconnected from ourselves.

We get more internally fractured and we have to just keep running and running and running from ourselves in order to stay afloat. But, if again, you're listening to this and you're engaged in these practices, it means that you have some inkling of curiosity to go inward, to see what actually is here and to meet it with a, we could say, courageous presence because it does require courage to really meet ourselves, honestly and truthfully. So if you are noticing this in your meditation practice, maybe a fear of the quiet or fear of the silence, know that it's normal. And if it's coming up at certain points in your practice, it could be because there's something going on in your life that is happening beneath the surface that you're trying to avoid. That's okay.

There's wisdom in the, in the avoidance. It's a defense mechanism. But eventually, it might be useful to, to take some time, to really go into that, to give yourself the space, to explore it, to be with it, to relax into it and see what is here that I've been avoiding. As Pema Chodron says, "Fear is a natural reaction to moving closer to the truth." So if you're feeling that in the silence, there's a chance you're getting closer to something important. Thank you for your practice.

Let's settle in for today's meditation.