Getting Still
Turn it down.
How do we achieve stillness so we can live our best lives? I’m going to tell you how today and after this we are going to explore all of the things we can do while we are still. You can be still in your job, be still while having fun as long as you don’t turn the volume down on your laughter. Laughing is one of my favorite things and it can be done loud and often in stillness. You can be still all of the time.
Let’s slow things down a bit. First we will filter out all the things we don’t need to waste our energy on. I want to treat my energy as my most valuable resource. I want to give it all to healing myself, friends, family, and my clients. I want to slow things down a bit. I want to bend time and think before I speak so that my words come from my honest sincere heart. I want to listen with my heart as well so I can hear what you really mean. I am willing to take constructive criticism but there is no place here for self-punishment. I sit in stillness ready to learn how to live my best life with an open heart and mind.
The second thing I need to too is turn down the sound. I have music on now in the background which I need to hear while I write. Keep it in the background. Turn down all sounds that can get a little loud. While I am in session with a client I do everything I can to turn down the outside noise. My client is my first priority. I want to create an environment where both my client and I are not distracted. This is what inspired me to make sound paintings which are one of the coolest things I’ve ever created. I love playing with sound and I’ll tell you all about that soon. The easiest way for me to start is a simple sound machine turned to something hypnotic like ocean waves or a brown or white noise. This little adjustment alone can change the tone of a massage with a client. A comforting static or waves while they drift away or just riding the waves while they are receiving their massage. We will explore this farther in the post about sound paintings.
Turn down the volume on social media. Clearly I use social media to network and learn about other people and events. I do not scroll my feed every day. On the rare occasion I do, I keep in mind the pitfalls. I will not engage in argumentative threads about any topic. There is a difference between educating someone and insisting that you are right nobody actually listening to each other. These are the kind of things that keep us up at night. I need a good long deep still sleep so I can do this all over again tomorrow. Turn down current events. If I listen to the news too often those stories keep me up at night. I turn them over and over in my head. I then go down a path of worrying about things I don’t have any control of. Hear what you need to hear once, I’m not telling you to turn a blind eye no pun intended. I’m simply telling you to turn it down. Don’t get the same bad news playing an unwanted track in your head. I discovered this during Covid. For the first few days of quarantine I watched the news all day. I heard about all of the unknowns echoing all of the fears I already had. On top of the uncertainty about the illness there were problems with small businesses getting unemployment. I was a single mother with a ten year old daughter and massage therapy was on hold but my bills were not. One day I woke up in the morning and didn’t turn on the television. Emilie and I waked everywhere. Those were some of the best memories I have with my daughter. We walked to the grocery store and home to cook dinner. We walked everywhere. They became our therapy sessions. Once we walked several miles to target because we wanted a ball to play games in the yard. We got to know our neighbors and spent a lot of time hanging outside with other adults and children. I listened to music. I watched old sitcoms on Hulu. I was so happy with this simpler happier life that I just never really made the news my background again. Instead when it got too hot and no pools were open we ordered a small pool for the back yard and bought some floaties. Nothing is more fun to me in life than floating and swinging. When it was too hot to swim I worked a customer service job working from home for Amazon. In May of that year when we were allowed to take massage clients again I made my garage in to a massage studio. I never knew that my garage would feel like my very own sanctuary. Sure it wasn’t everyone’s cup of tea but that time changed my life. I realized I could work in my very own space, my home, where I feel the happiest and can bring every tool I could offer. I received so much support from my clients and I supported and cared for them too. We had a safe environment where we could talk about our fears of riots, evictions, the unknown, of Covid, and how our lives had changed. I’ve had the volume turned down on media. It has been a background noise ever since quarantine. Turn down conversations you hear if they don’t concern you then you don’t need to hear it. Or like my mom used to say sometimes it’s none of your business.
Create your still background. I have created an Apple Music play list called “The Soundtrack to My Life”. The sounds are nostalgic. They could be from my childhood when we went to the skating rink on Saturday nights or songs we listen too when we bought compact disks that were $25 apiece. They were songs from when I was about five or so and our babysitter used to watch MTV day and talk on the phone. I wanted to be just like her.
They could be songs with messages I need to hear right now. They could just be fun and lighthearted something you would hear while having fun with your girlfriends. They could remind me of my love. They could be instrumentals that inspire creativity. Some stay on there for quite a while, others I rotate in and out every week. I listen to it when I write my blog, when I take a bath which is a whole other post, sometimes when I am in a place where I need to hear my own background noise.
Once you have turned the volume down on sound you don’t need and turned up the sounds that inspire you then the real awesome part of stillness begins. When I was a little girl I dreamed that if I was still that my bedroom would come to life, all of my toys and my places I could transport too, all of my ideas. I sit in my stillness every day and the life I want, all of my dreams begin to take shape and come to life.