Resting your mind is as important, if not more so, than catching a “now and then” nap.
Take a jar. Fill it with water. Add a scoop of dirt. Fasten the lid. Shake the bottle. After a few shakes, place the jar on a table. Allow it to sit in stillness. What happens? The mud settles to the bottom and clarity rises to the top.
Think of the mud as if they were your (50,000+ day) thoughts. The more we sit in silence or stillness, we begin to experience clarity in the mind. We can begin to see and feel ourselves more clearly. We can see others more clearly and we can bring positive change into our lives.
It is why a daily practice of Mindfulness Meditation can allow us to become more aware of our thoughts and when that occurs, we can learn to choose to bring clarity into our lives. We can learn to pay less attention to those baseless thoughts that create stress, anxiety, worry, self-doubt, depression, etc . When we can begin to accomplish a sense of control over our thoughts, the less our body will be afflicted from all those physical manifestations from which we suffer.
In a 2013 study (in Frontiers in Human Neuroscience) it was written that “when the brain rests it is able to integrate internal and external information into a conscious work space. When you are not distracted by noise or goal-orientated tasks, there appears to be a quiet time that allows your conscious workspace to process things. During these periods of silence, your brain has the freedom it needs to discover its place in your internal and external world. This default mode helps you think about profound things in an imaginative way.”
The inner noise of our thoughts can have a pronounced effect on our brains resulting in elevated levels of stress hormones. Silence seems to have the opposite effect to that noise. A study published in the journal Heart discovered that two minutes of silence can prove to be even more relaxing than listening to “relaxing” music. They based these findings of changes they noticed in blood pressure and blood circulation in the brain. With Mindfulness, one can discover that silence isn’t empty.
All profound things and emotions of things are preceded and attended by silence. (Herman Melville)