The Uncomfortable Side of Quiet

I thought slowing down would mean enjoying some time out. How wrong could I be?

I had a strong urge over the Summer to just stop all the striving and forcing and to simply nurture myself. I was starting to feel way off kilter and recognised some familiar warning signs. So I literally stopped the doing. And what resulted was completely unexpected. It sounds so easy to say, just stop and be still. Yet, there can be a very uncomfortable side to doing nothing. For me this has been a fascinating, sometimes challenging journey, which has completely shifted how I now view life.

Everywhere we go these days, we are told to slow down, be mindful, meditate and find moments of peace. What we don't hear quite as much about is what can happen when we actually stop. After years of filling every available space with something, I felt tremendous guilt at not doing something productive. There was fear of losing the business I had spent the last few years building. There was intense discomfort and restlessness and I could feel the mind constantly pulling me towards doing something “productive” to move me forward. I even observed how doing nothing had become a thing to do.

I noticed how addicted I was to my phone. It was never out of my hand and I often caught myself picking it up whilst doing something “relaxing", then looking at it and wondering why? Was I looking for connection? A distraction? Or hoping there would be a life changing message? I honestly had no idea. Sometimes, I would pick up the phone to do something, see a notification, start scrolling and then forget why I had picked it up in the first place.

The quietness of not doing anything highlighted the noise in my head. The mental chatter was deafening. I heard it planning, solving, thinking, creating. There were judgements, comparisons and even predictions. It was particularly masterful at going over past experiences and replaying conversations. I caught it several times having a heated discussion with someone who had upset me. It struck me how I was having imaginary conversations in my head that I had decided, in real life, weren't worth having. Yet these very conversations were colouring the relationship with that person in real time! How ridiculous! Whether I was doing something or nothing, my mind was still on the racetrack, whirring round at top speed. That is when I realised stopping isn’t necessarily resting.

The quiet didn't create the noise but it allowed me to hear it.

It was relentless and I realised it had always been there, I was just too busy to hear how loud it was before. I then began to observe emotions that arose and what was interesting was how I would sense something physically, maybe a tightness in my chest or a knot in my stomach and see how the mind immediately grabbed on to it and gave it a label:

This is fear. I am feeling fearful, for example.

And here is the fascinating part. The mind then searched memories to find previous examples and connected them with that emotion. It found experiences, conversations, anything it could to find evidence to form a continuing story around this current sensation. And it was compelling.

Until I realised it wasn’t.

Because I finally saw what was happening. The mind was taking a current sensation and using experiences that were no longer happening to explain and validate it. Those experiences may have been true in the past, or not, but they certainly weren't happening in this moment.

It hit me how I had spent my entire life believing these thoughts and feelings were truthful and living life as if they were gospel.

I realised that what I had known intellectually for years — that a feeling can simply be a sensation until the mind labels it and builds a story around it — was something very different when I could actually see the process unfolding in myself. What I hadn't seen so clearly before was what happens next. How the mind uses these stories, built from past experiences, to construct a version of who we believe we are.

I could see it happening in myself, in real time. And once I saw that, I couldn't unsee it.

If the stories I use to define myself aren't true in this moment, then what makes me think the “me” I've constructed from them is true now?

Think about it. The mind is legitimising the feeling by remembering past experiences, conversations, failures etc. Maybe they were true in the past, but they aren't happening now. The mind makes it appear real but really it’s just conning me. That persona of Sue is based on wisps of illusion.

This made me laugh so much. Because how absolutely absurd is this!

Seeing this construct of the mind felt both liberating and completely disorienting at the same time. Knowing I could be “somebody” other than who I thought I was felt mind-blowing. I didn't have to keep defending or becoming the version of Sue I'd constructed or thought I should be. There was a freedom and trust, the extent of which I had never experienced before. I began to notice when I was taking action because the old construct told me I ought to and when the action felt natural and aligned. I felt able to say no to things where previously, I would have said yes. Yet by seeing the game and how it had forged how I had lived life, I also felt a huge pang of regret. I saw how hard I had continually strived to maintain this construct of who I thought I was and the consequent suffering that arose from that. And it hurt.

And yet, even that is a mind construct. Regret implies life should have been different. But wishing things to be different is a fool's game. I can't control life events.

What I can do is notice when my mind is trying to pull me back into an old story and choose not to follow.

And this is life-changing.

So, who are you underneath the person you believe yourself to be?