Fighting The Quiet
Discovering a deeper understanding of my spiritual path
I’ve been sitting at my kitchen table for the last few hours. Basic internet work: sending emails, paying bills, checking in on social stuff, etc. The house is quiet. The animals who are usually causing all kinds of unnamed chaos have settled into various nooks and crannies to rest. I can hear our large black cat snoring on the kitchen table next to me. I haven’t turned the tv on since we returned from our vacation a couple days ago. I’m not even listening to music or letting a youtube video run in the background. It’s quiet.
The fact that it is quiet is remarkable, but only half as remarkable as the fact that it doesn’t bother me.
When I was a young adult I lived with my sister for a short while in St. Louis. She was a busy Ph.D. student/adjunct professor and I was a vaguely checked-out college student. She came home to our red brick walk up one day and immediate began yelling,
“How on Earth can you stand this?!”
I was unclear what she was referring to and my expression told her as much. I was just sitting on the couch playing my guitar, half goofing off, half practicing for an upcoming coffee shop gig. Pretty normal stuff for me.
Then she made her way into the living room, where I was sitting, and pointed to the tv that was playing some day-time talk show, then to the kitchen where I had left the radio on, and then finally to my bedroom where my computer was cycling through my vast mp3 collection. Now, I think it’s helpful to understand that our apartment was for sure less than 1000 square feet, all on one floor, and a fairly open floor plan, meaning all of these sounds were audible at the same time the second you ascended the staircase.
My sister was in agony, but I barely even noticed.
Of course, I’ve come to realize how bizarre and off-putting it must have been to come home to such a cacophony, but it is only in the last couple of years that I have come to realize why I needed so much noise around me—to drown out the noise inside of me.
For so much of my life quiet was nearly unbearable. I would do anything to fill the space, and ran myself into the ground in the process. I was trying to find equilibrium. Like a diver coming up from the depths trying to avoid the bense. I needed the outside to be as loud as my inside—or I felt like I’d start bleeding from the ears.
Enter the Enneagram, Yoga, and Contemplation.
I started my yoga journey at a time in my life where the internal noise was at an all time high, and my life was in shambles because of it. It was POWER yoga—because that was literally the only kind of yoga I could tolerate. Yes, it focused on the breath and cultivated a sense of inner-quiet, but it did it in a loud and intense way—which is what I needed. The heat of the studio, the intensity of the postures, the pace of the movements wrecked me in the best way. It was like I was turning up the volume in my body to match what was happening in my heart and my head. And soon enough, the internal noise became bearable.
Bearable enough, in fact, to start to play with the idea of stillness, and maybe even scarier: silence.
Slowly, I started my Centering Prayer practice, in the guise of “prayer yoga.” I wasn’t actually interested in silence, but I loved how I felt in the studio and even more how I felt after I left. I also had some understanding that I needed my life and schedule to be as full as my head was. The noise I was using to manage my internal landscape now wasn’t necessarily audible, but was more schedule-related. And while I was no stranger to packing my schedule to the point of no return, it was in this phase of my life I learned how important it was to pack my schedule with things that were actually helping me instead of just offering a distraction.
I would fidget, my mind would wander, I would stare out the window, but slowly the silence became something I wasn’t afraid of. At times it was even enjoyable. The silence and I eventually became friends, and the more I studied the Enneagram, the more I realized why I need this friend so badly. My type structure was built on the loud intensity of never slowing down, never showing weakness, and never allowing myself to feel hurt. Knowing these things helped me to see why I needed the silence, and what to expect as the relationship grew.
If I’m honest, I definitely started this journey thinking, “If I just do all these ‘spiritual’ things, then no one can hurt me again ever!” I was using my spiritual journey as another way to reinforce the armor of my type, in other words, I was a textbook example of spiritual bypassing. But as my self-understanding grew with the Enneagram, and my self-acceptance grew with my spiritual practices, I realized that my journey was leading me to exactly where I didn’t want to go—but I knew I needed to be.
I wanted my practices to be a “spiritual life hack” and boost my productivity. I wanted to “DO THE MOST” with my life by busying myself until I found myself caught in the noise again—both internally and externally. But instead, my practices quieted me. They slowed me They softened me. They made me feel. And what’s worse, is they made me love it.
My internal landscape underwent a radical transformation. Stillness, quiet, clarity, vulnerability. The inside had shifted dramatically, but the outside was still rolling along the way it always had. At first I was proud that my newfound clarity made navigating my busy, loud, and intense life so much easier. But soon the universal need for equilibrium made itself known again, the inside needed to match the outside, and because I wasn’t aware, the inside started to slowly lift in volume. My practices weren’t offering the same respite or clarity, and they weren’t keeping the volume down like they used to.
I started the painstaking work of lowering the volume of my external life. I was doing less, saying no to more, and struggling against this new kind of quiet. The feeling of resistance was familiar—it was just like the resistance I felt years earlier confronting my internal noise, offering it quiet and calm. But this time I didn’t just have to contend with my own distaste for this kind of existence, I had to contend with everyone else’s, too. I told friends, “no” for maybe the first time in our friendship, I scaled back what my schedule looked like. I intentionally made the outside match the inside.
And for the first time in my life, doing less, or even doing nothing at all, felt okay. Years ago, only a few months into my yoga journey, I contracted mono (did you know you can transfer mono through sweat?! It tore through our hot yoga studio one summer!), and staying home and resting for two whole weeks felt like a living hell. But now it feels like a relief. Slowing things down has been sweet and satisfying in a way I never thought possible.
Our contemplative practices aren’t just about changing our insides, they will literally require you to change the outsides of your life as well, and vice versa if you tend toward the other direction. This is what real, meaningful, and tangible change looks like. Inner and Outer Transformation. The Enneagram gave me a map of what this journey would look like, and my practices made it possible.
And now I’m sitting at my kitchen table in the quiet, loving every minute of it.
If you’re interested in learning more about how to use the Enneagram in your spiritual journey, check out this in-person workshop I’m teaching in Austin in September!
https://www.consciousenneagram.com/shop/enneagram-for-the-spiritual-journey
This is a great testament for the "anti-hack" lifestyle.