Monday Morning Motivation – Silence
(Sharing Resources to Help You Grow Personally, Professionally & Financially)
Sometimes it helps to get a little dose of encouragement — along with a good cup of coffee! — to start the day.
Hopefully the message below will help you get off to a good start for the week. Please feel free to forward the newsletter on to others that you think would benefit from the content.
Silence
(NOTE – For the next six weeks, I’m going to focus on each of Hal Elrod’s “SAVERS” in sequence. If you are curious about the background for these topics,take a few minutes to check out the summary of his book “The Mircacle Morning”. It’s one of the best I have ever read!)
Kids. Spouse. Co-workers. Television. Radio. CELL PHONE! Computer. Voices….
It is pretty darn rare in today’s world to NOT have your senses assailed by the noises that surround us. That means that our brains are constantly processing. So here’s the deal, when was the last time you treated your brain to a “spa session”?
We are blessed with the amazing capacity to think. It is what differentiates us from all of God’s creatures. But we need to remember that as with all gifts we need to take time to appreciate what we have been given.
This AM I finished my 17th day of meditating for ten minutes. I know! Meditation is mumbo jumbo that Bill Walton and monks rave about. It’s not for you. And I’ve always agreed 100%. Trained as an engineer the last thing I want to do is to listen to monks and Walton! But I’ve been wrong. Through the help of an app on my iPhone I’ve been able to spend ten minutes each AM in silence (huge irony here that a tech app is the facilitator to put me in touch with the anti-tech!). The contrast of silence with constant mental processing has been incredibly insightful.
Full disclosure, it has NOT been “silence” in the traditional sense of no noise. Rather, it has been taking time out to let my mind have a reprieve from all of the thoughts that have been attacking it. I’m not going to go in to details of what the process involves – that’s for you to discover on your own. As the saying goes, life’s about the journey. What I will share is that during these ten minutes my mind has been allowed to STOP. To be silent. Imagine that. Actually having a mere ten minutes when you are free of the noise of life. Free of trying to figure it all out.
Silence is about giving your mind a ten minute trip to the spa. It’s about taking the time to rest our ability to think. The gift – the ability to think – that makes us unique on this earth needs to be appreciated. And spending a few minutes “turning it off” allows us to really appreciate it. The silence lets our minds rest. The absence of thinking allows us to experience what our mind DOES by allowing the mind to stop doing it. As with so many things (light/dark, man/woman, happy/sad, etc.), we only appreciate each side of the equation by understanding the opposite side of the equation.
That brings us to this week’s question:
- Don’t you owe your mind a trip to the silence “day spa”?
Thanks for sharing a bit of your time with me this Monday morning and I wish you all the best for the week.
Curt
Blog posts from this past week:
