Can you hear the oceanic sound of your soul?
How often are you able to slow down your busy life and listen ( truly listen) to your heart and soul and give it what it needs? We’re focusing on the material and the controlled things, but what about the things we can’t control but are there with us at all times?
In yoga, we often hear we need to tune in with our body and listen to our breath and control the breathing for a better feeling of calm and relaxation. However, the breath is there at all times, even if we don’t control it. It takes a life of its own, but we are often too busy to slow down and observe it.
Noticing is the first practice in mindfulness. Not judging, just observing what’s there.
As a person who struggles with an overly excited brain and is highly cognitive, my mind is racing all the time. The words start floating and driving up the sentences as I lay this article down in the time of a few breaths. The space I allow myself in between to transition from one thought to another is so tight that I barely notice my typos and I am already finishing up and wrapping to publish it.
We’re all a little bit like this in parts of our busy days. But do we ever allow ourselves to slow down the rhythm and notice WHY we do what we do?
I spend most of my days now reflecting rather than going on autopilot about things I need to finish. It’s exhausting and it makes me feel unproductive. I can’t sit with myself too long as my mind needs to find new projects, thoughts to explore and complex problems to solve. But then I go to my yoga classes and I stop…I stop and I listen to my oceanic sound of my breath that is there without me controlling it. And then I express gratitude because I am able to listen to my soul. It’s there. It’s vivid, full of emotions, enthusiasm, ambitions, and aspirations. I’m as much highly creative as I am self-reflected nowadays and that helps me balance more this burst of bubbly personality that makes up my “style”.
I was watching last night “Inside Out”, an animation movie by Pixar which shows how young Riley grows up and forms the “islands” of her personality that make her HER.
She’s transitioning from one stage to another of her life without really feeling the “line” between the stages. The lines are blurred and the more we transition without reflecting we lose parts of our long term memory that no longer serve us. Yet, the islands we formed once have a role and could use our time and space to see why they disappear and what need they served.
Giving ourselves time is something people might not feel they need to do because we live in a western mindset of productivity which is measured by KPI’s which ultimately links to facts and deliverable. As we rush to deliver, acquire and reach new milestones, we give little to no importance to our essence, the oceanic sound of our soul who is longing for being noticed.
We’re seeing how people who “notice” and “see” our oceanic breath and essence are able to form deep connections with us and we feel we need to cling on to it as if we’d be losing the connection to ourselves if we lose this person who “saw” us. But in fact, that’s just a mirage or a product of our imagination or fears because we can’t master the practice of listening to our inner voice on our own.
It’s within human nature to seek connection and not want to accept an ascetic life. However, most lessons one can get are from solitude rather than by always having their energy interfering with another one. Learning to channel and manipulate your own energy is part of listening to your oceanic sound of your soul.
We learn that meditation and mindfulness help us do that. We also learn that meditation is hard but also easy. A good article about this topic was written here.
However, I believe there are 2 reasons why we find it both easy and hard:
- It’s easy because the only thing you need to do is really listen and notice the changes in your body as you breathe just like a cat scan can read your body activity underneath your skin.
- But it’s also hard because we are not trained from a young age to understand these bodily sensations and to translate and transform them into perspectives about how our body is adapting to how our mind changes and how our ego sets new goals for our life.
I think this part, about being prepared to understand and interpret sensations takes the most effort because it requires embodiment, presence, and practice with a long term commitment. We often shy away and avoid activities that require too much work. Our brains ( so mind) refuses to face new challenges. Its resistance will stay in the way of acquiring this skill. In the western world, we’ve developed machines and revolutionized industry to be able to automate processes and spend less time doing it manually. However, the eastern world is still putting an emphasis on manual labor and working with the hands. This is the main attribute of mindfulness. If we are replacing it in the western world, how might we bring it back in other ways? Can we rekindle the passion for arts and crafts as a way to regain the ability to sit with our struggles and emotions longer until we can interpret them?
As a person who also ran away from the craft of architecture and is nowadays working more with the mind on business, service design and marketing, I feel the same need to reconnect and rediscover more ways to stay in my body other than yoga. I sometimes go road cycling as a way to do that. Other times I write, bake, clean or do something with my hands to regain the sensations that I miss out on by working too much with my mind. But one thing is clear: I can always focus back to listen to the oceanic sound of my soul because I practice it daily despite its challenges.
This article is part of my first book on mental health and social innovation by talking about the things that we normally don’t talk about. If you’re interested in the topic hit following in my profile and stay tuned to my posts.