The Healing Power of Silence

The Healing Power of Silence

Last night our entire neighborhood was without power for about four hours.   It was a blessing in disguise! My husband and I ate dinner by candlelight, unplugged from our electronic devices, and made good old fashioned conversation. One of the gifts of a power outage is silence!

What a great coincidence since I had planned to post this article on The Healing Power of Silence today.

Even though I sometimes play music in yoga class, I almost always practice yoga at home in silence.

The quiet hush of morning practice on my porch is liquid mother-nuturance. Birds chirp. Church bells ring distantly. Sweet cool dewy of air kisses my skin. It is beyond compare.

Why? Because there’s a very profound benefit to silence it in a world full of mechanized, synthetic, man-made sounds.

Sound inundates us all the time, whether we like it or not. Many sounds are disharmonious to the body such as the sound of traffic, music that is aggressive or that beats to a rhythm that stimulates the stress response.  Refrigerators. Computers. Cell phones. Wi-fi. HVAC.  These sound vibrate at a frequency that is in conflict with the vibrational frequency of the living human cell.  As a result, they take human cells out of resonance with their optimal vibration.

Our ears are the only organ of perception that we cannot turn off.  We can close our eyes and mouth and plug our nose so that we don’t see, smell or taste.  But we cannot stop hearing, even with ear plugs!
According to the yoga teachings, hearing is the most subtle sense.  It is the last sense to go as we die.  Because it’s so subtle, sounds penetrate deeply into our energy bodies. Sounds and noises have a huge yet potentially unrecognized impact on our mood and health.

This wreaks havoc on our bodies and our minds!  If you’re not convinced, try this. The next time there’s a power outage and everything gets turned off—notice how restful and at peace you feel.
Similarly, when we practice in silence with the breath, we reset our bodies to the natural harmonic vibration of health.

Practice
You are what you eat, you are what you hear.  Notice what you consume through your ears. Practice consuming a diet of healthy sounds.  Invite your family or room mates to join you in a sound fast—-an afternoon or evening of silence.  If you listen to music, choose music with harmonious vibration and positive lyrics.  My current favorite— Sean Johnson and the Wild Lotus Band.

Love and light,