The QUIET… pt. 2When I was a huge advocate for HUSTLING to get what you want or need out of life, the concept of starting my day with prayer and meditation made me CRINGE.

I would think, WHO has time to get quiet? When I started my days, I would wake up with all of the things that I SHOULD and COULD be doing, on my mind… those things would drive me to hit the ground running EVERY MOMENT that I could. I ended my day with my mind still racing.And I thought, the more I worked and the harder I worked, then the quicker I would get to my desired outcome. And ohhhh did that prove me wrong… I mean, don’t misunderstand me. The work was not in vain, and it definitely reaped some temporary wins, but it also left some BIG LESSONS LEARNED in life around the concepts of trusting and receiving. (More of this in future posts)Believe me, I didn’t come willingly to the world of mandatory quiet. I came because I had run out of ways to “figure” out my way of doing life… how to do marriage, how to do parenting, how to do teaching, how to build businesses, how to juggle and perform and succeed and do it FOREVER! LOL ( I love my ambitious drive… totally not a mistake and no regrets).But my point to saying all of this is that, Mandatory quiet showed up, after I was BURNED OUT.

If you have never experienced burn out, then let me explain my experience. It came after my mind and body had exhausted all of my physical, mental and emotional energy. I felt like I didn’t want to do anything that use to bring me so much joy. I literally wanted to quit EVERYTHING… I didn’t want to die… I just wanted to go away… I didn’t want to be needed, responsible for anything and anybody, and I just wanted to be still.The experience can happen to any of us… Many of us will go thru it, because we learn best thru experience.

I was told to slow down by many loving people in my life, but my actions proved that the lesson would be best learned by my own experience. I use to think it had to do with a potential mental imbalance, as I hear a lot of our culture teaching us now. And although there are many cases of true mental chemical imbalances happening, there are also just as many misdiagnosed experiences being had. I wonder if most people are just experiencing the mind and body feeling pure exhaustion from not being fully supported by the soul because our souls have been out of alignment for sooooo long. (We are not just one dimensional beings… we are three parts – mind, body, and soul)We have not been leading soul lead lives… we have been lead by the minds and bodies of other people…We gave away our authority.We have said okay to things that were not okay, moved in directions because it was right for someone else but told it was also right for us, only to find after frustration, disappointment, exhaustion and illness, that the message for them, wasn’t the same message for us. We gave away our authority. We intuitively felt when it was time to move on to the next step in our journey, but didn’t listen because we were stuck in survival mode… we didn’t want to be shunned from our communities, or looked at judgmentally, or misunderstood, because how can we survive if we are not in community?

So we stayed instead of having the courage to build our own community… and became resentful, bitter, angry, unattractive, uninspired, unmotivated, ineffective… “the problem”. We stopped growing… and we started dying.This isn’t all just metaphoric… literally we start dying. All of the low frequency emotions that I just listed… They are all amazing indicators that our Creator gave us to know when we are not in alignment with something we are doing or have done.

When we experience these emotions for long periods of time and choose not to listen to them and change them, then our body becomes weaker… and begins to resonate in a lower vibrating frequency… The frequency of sickness and disease…I was there and didn’t even know it, until I got quiet…Quiet… was not so quiet at first. It was noisier than a classroom of music students during those last few days of school. My mind had sooo much chatter in it… it was all of the evidence of my conditioning… it was the long lists of coulda shoulda woulda’s… that had to do with EVERY ASPECT of my life… relationship, spirituality, business, desires… all the things. It was filled with thoughts about my past, my present and my future, and would jump around randomly wherever it wanted to go. Frustration was the first main feeling. “I can’t get control of my mind… “ I would say… and then my mind would find a way back to thinking about what I would rather be doing, while trying to experience the quiet.

But the real quiet… once I finally learned how to tune in… became a gift that reaped rewards that I would have NEVER been able to obtain any other way. The Quiet now, honors the thoughts that come out of nowhere… however, it places no meaning to the thoughts, and allows them to pass, like clouds in the sky. And then they become less, until I hear thoughts that have nothing to do with what my mind knows. That’s when I know I’m connected.The Quiet now, leaves room for receiving. Truly receiving from my Creator in the most intimate way. My depth of understanding who my Creator is, and who I am, and what it is like to live life thru the lens of grace and love, didn’t come to me, until I experienced the Quiet. At one time, I felt like I couldn’t live in a world where there is mandatory Quiet, but now… I couldn’t imagine a world without it. Have you ever experienced this type of connection and awareness? Have you given yourself Permission to experience it today?