Healing in Silence

This past month has been among the hardest I’ve known — not only for the layers of loss but also for being unable to cope in the only way I knew how. When I get upset, I get productive. I make plans, and I achieve them. It tends to work, when there isn’t a pandemic.

Since March, I’ve been struggling with the inability to accomplish. I wholeheartedly support the concept of defying and redefining productivity, but I couldn’t seem to believe it and apply it in my life. Only when I had run myself deep into the ground was I finally forced to find an alternative.

In a therapy session, my counsellor introduced me to a CBT technique called MAPS (Mastery, Altruism, Pleasure, Silence). She told me to incorporate a bit of each letter into every day, and I realized how I had always relied on Mastery alone as my coping mechanism. Once it was no longer enough though, the opposite rose to fill its place — Silence.

I first noticed it woven throughout my days — riding alone when the ranch was closed to the public, lighting incense and praying, reading classics for my book club. Suddenly, I found myself praying every day. Suddenly, I was no longer on my phone until bedtime, scrolling in an endlessly unfulfilling loop. I realized how rare and freeing it feels to exist when the world quietens. I realized I have the power to create those moments. Silence requires nothing of me. It meets me where I’m at, and it was in that honesty that I began to heal.

There’s so much research that shows how silence decreases your adrenaline levels and activates your parasympathetic nervous system. I knew all the theory, but it went so against my nature that I only began incorporating it when I had no choice. How could lack of distraction, seemingly doing nothing, be the answer?

When everything we know is torn from the roots, radical change is needed to regrow in the most expansive way. In reflecting on my healing this month, I’m reminded of how much I don’t know, which was precisely why I chose to lean into my learning zone in the first place, even when growing pains are crushing.

Living in my comfort zone would have saved me so much grief that I’m still working through, and I have no idea what I’ll feel or how I’ll act when the dust settles — but more than ever, I’m curious to find out.