perception widening silence

satyam jnanam anandam Brahma

Truth, Knowledge, Bliss, Absolute

Before I ever visited Sri Lanka, I didn’t know my much about it. I had seen a picture or two on Instagram, but it wasn’t a place I knew anyone from or heard about often.

But when I came back to NYC from Sri Lanka, it was as though Sri Lanka had followed me home.

I was walking down the street not too far from my apartment and noticed a Sri Lankan restaurant, which I had never before noticed. I went into the Indian store to pick up a few things and next to my normal rice was the red rice, ‘product of Sri Lanka’. I walked into the local grocery store after teaching craving a cold coconut water. I picked up a glass bottle from a brand I’d never seen before, and it was ‘king coconut’, the species indigenous to Sri Lanka...product of Sri Lanka. How had I never noticed any of this before?

All of this to say that when the mind experiences or learns something new, it then uses this information as an filter, giving the mind feedback and stimulation on what to notice and see around us.

Sometimes, like in this instance for me, it is clear, obvious even, what is influencing our perception of the world. But most of the time, we are unaware of what is influencing us and what ideas have built the foundation of our deeply held belief systems.

Throughout the course of October, we explored the practice of mauna. Mauna is often translated as ‘silence’. Often we think of the word silence as the ‘absence of sound’. But if you’ve ever sat in meditation, you may have become aware that even in ‘silence’ there is still sound all around. In many languages, the word used for silence is the same word as stillness. They are considered synonyms.

Mauna is the practice of cultivating stillness in the body (through not speaking or moving) as a means to find stillness in the mind.

Quite often, at the onset of a mauna practice, the mind gets very heated, flustered, angry, anxious or annoyed. We’ve cut off the minds outer source of stimulation and it is scrambling to gets its fix. It is similar to the experience of turning off a child’s favorite TV show before it is over in an attempt to get them to bed on time. The mind, just like a distressed toddler, kicks and screams in revolt.

But if we allow the mind to sit with its own discomfort, then with time the mind will stop fighting. My teacher Monica described it so beautifully. She said that the practice of mauna involves not only that we stop speaking with others, but that we also stop speaking to ourselves, to our mind. When the mind realizes it no longer has an audience, it eventually bores and will settle into stillness.

There is so much to be discovered through this stillness. Early on in our practice, we may begin to simply notice sounds around us that the mind was previously filtering out. This may later transition into the discovery of thoughts and beliefs we previously didn’t realize were guiding and influencing our actions. We may become aware of, uncover, that which the mind been resisting, or actively ‘not seeing or hearing’.

The teachings of yoga tell us that this process of uncovering can lead us towards that which is underneath all thoughts, that which is at the core of our being- true or real knowledge.