Want to shut down those nattering inner voices and be truly present for the holidays? I don’t know about you, but I have this problem with my inner dialogue: it never allows me any peace. A good friend of mine once called it a hamster wheel. Years ago when I worked with the mystic Peter Kingsley, I learned to be present to all my sensation, to experience reality and shut down the hamster wheel. This was after years of trying different forms of meditation. For me, Presence Awareness is a saving grace.
Lately, I have been listening to the
shaman Lujan Matus’ Whisperings of the Dragon on audio books and finding confirmation for my practice from a different source. His language is different, but he confirms what I have already experienced, helping me to understand on a deeper level. My opening to presence has always been through the sensation of sound. I let go, aware of the entire soundscape and I shift. Our universe is paradoxical, contrary to expectation, contradictory. This is true to my experience, the more noise going on in the soundscape, the more I am aware of the silence and stillness at the core of my being. It leaves me in awe and there is no room for my mind to butt in and create its usual hamster wheel of the unnecessary machinations which sidetrack me. Matus describes this as externalizing your hearing 100 percent.
In another teaching, he says our eyes are meant to be used 98 percent for seeing internally, leaving 2 percent for cursory glances at the world around us. Closing my my eyes, seeing internally is also part of
my practice. Thinking about it, I realized we often use our eyes as a tool for judgment. Sometimes that is necessary. For instance, I make judgments with my vision while I am driving. But I also use my eyes to judge what I see with pre-conceived expectations. Becoming more aware of my internal vision directs me to my inner world, to awareness rising up through my roots tapped into the greater whole. When connected to that, even with eyes open (cursory glances), I sense that something deeper than me is looking out through my eyes. The voice of ego is silent in these moments.
My inner dialogue distracts me from sacred ground. Those voices come from my experiences and social programming. They form the ego – my social fear system. They are inserts which I picked up over the years from people telling me how I should be (well-intended or not). They are defenses I created around feeling hurt, betrayed, rejected, or unseen. Most are judgments, turned inward and turned outward. They become the cloudy filters through which I experience the present, set me up with unrealistic expectations, and prevent me from seeing and discerning.
We always have access to profound stillness and silence within. This is the home of our intuition. It can be incredibly subtle and requires our un-occluded awareness to work well. When we are captured by our hamster wheel, we lose touch with that touchstone to the Divine.
I wonder if the story about the Tower of Babel is about the folly of trying to reach God through the limitations of language and mind – the “babble” which interferes with the true language of the Universe – Experience, here in the moment. Words and concepts can never truly capture the breadth of our experience. Our inner dialogue also tears us away from each other – distracting us from truly listening. When we are present, we are in service to the universe and to each other.
Do you have a practice that silences your inner dialogue and connects you to your roots? I offer this as an option to try. Externalize your hearing, internalize your vision, and see what happens. Take the practice into the holidays for really being present with your loved ones.
08
A Column
by Maura Torkildson
Your Inner Tree
RHG Magazine & TV Guide TM - Fall/Winter 2017 © All rights reserved.
Silencing the Hamster Wheel for the Holidays