The Soundless Sound

We live in a world of endless noise. Influences swirl around us like waves on the surface, telling us how to be, what to do, what to want. It’s so human to lose our own voice in the sea of it all. We begin to adopt someone else’s thinking as if it were our own.

One of the outside narratives that has echoed in my mind for years has been equating my worth to my body. I’ve come such a far way, yet threads of that are subtly still there. It’s one of the avenues where my work still lies.

Growing up as a beautiful young girl, I remember being twelve years old, out on a run, when a truck full of men yelled out the window and hooted at me. They were giving me attention, yet at the time I was battling a very serious eating disorder.

As I lost more weight and entered my later teens, I started to get more attention for my figure. On the outside, I appeared confident, sexy, sporty, happy… but on the inside, I felt like I was giving my power away to that external voice or those external voices for validation. My weight and my shape became so intricately tied into my value and my sense of worth.

Along my journey reclaiming my power, I began to dress more conservatively. Style became a way to balance self expression while also creating sacred space from a world of objectification and never ending pressure to be a certain way. I created space to own the value that lives within me that has absolutely nothing to do with my external appearance: my big heart, my eternal optimistic nature, my nurturing energy, my creativity, my sharp discernment and antenna for truth, my innocence. I began to unfold into loving myself naturally as I am. And as I’ve grown into adulthood, I’ve embraced style in a way that accentuates my natural beauty and doesn’t showcase my figure as a measure of my worth.

Every now and then, though, I want to play—show a little more skin and let the sunshine kiss my legs and my arms. I thoroughly enjoy that. And, it’s still an edge I ride and stretch as I go along. More recently I have felt invited to rock styles that do accentuate my figure, a new edge.

This morning, I was on a run in shorts, and as I started running, I heard a car honk. Instantly I heard the voice old self speak—and along with it, the ways I used to feel small in that sea of noise and objectification. As I put one foot in front of the other, I heard those familiar outside voices and images echo faintly in the air: you should be skinnier… legs for days… you’re too chunky… pressure from an ex-boyfriend’s expectations…movie lines…commercials commodifying thinness… the external voices in the collective consciousness surrounding my legs. It was like that car horn tuned me back into a radio station I hadn’t tune into for a while. Yet, where the volume used to play on high, I felt a space from it all that showed me the space I had created within my mind.

In that space, I felt the agency to tune into a different radio station. I guided my attention to take in the sound of the music in my AirPods. And in the absorption of the music, I felt my heart beat. And in that space, I felt a silence speak. In the feeling of inner knowing beyond words, I felt at home within myself.

It’s brilliant how silence speaks whenever we seek to listen, isn’t it? Even amidst the noise. Because silence isn’t the absence of sound. It’s a soundless inner knowing.

I kept running, and from that inner silence I began to hear my own voice speak: I want to swing my hips because it feels good. I love my body. My body is a vessel to experience the beauty of being alive. As my experience began to shift back to my own, I felt the familiar warmth of the sun on my thighs. Everything was simple again. The noise of the past had dissolved, and my attention was taking in the felt experience of the now, through my own voice.

It’s experiences like this that leave me feeling so grateful for the way my meditation practice has taught me how to resource and create space within. In my eyes closed practice of transcendence, I meet my mind in the endless waves of thought and allow the mantra—the subtlest sound that emanates out of the field of silence—to orient my mind inward. As the mind dives within, I settle into a field of silence akin to the bottom of the ocean floor.

I tune my mind and my nervous system to the space inside that holds my unchanging truth. In Sanskrit, this soundless sound is called inner naad. Naad literally means “sound,” but here it refers to the divine vibration eternally present within and around us.

Aristotle observed that external sound arises when an object moves the air, causing vibration that travels to the listener’s ear. Inner sound, however, is different. It does not depend on any object. It is an unstruck, soundless sound that merges the listener into one unified whole.

Silence is the sound of existence. It doesn’t belong to a language or religion or set of societal standards. It is beyond words, beyond form, beyond all fluctuations and ever changing waves of existence. It is the ocean beneath the wave. And only when the mind has transcended all the ripples of form and flux, can it arrive at a field of pure silence. In that moment, the soundless sound can be heard. It is like stepping into the stream of eternal existence, turning the volume down on the world’s noise just enough to hear the soundtrack of pure awareness.

This soundless sound vibrates in our inner being, creating a state of sat chit ananda—supreme inner joy and contentedness, uninfluenced by the external world. The moment one hears the soundless sound, transformation happens. We directly experience the source of who we are, the oneness that connects us all. In that direct experience, our mind shifts from believing its narratives to knowing itself as a field of awareness beneath thought.

To touch the ocean beneath the wave, we emerge wet with inner knowing. For this is the backdrop for everything. Silence is the baseline from which we can hear our own heartbeat and our own voice. It’s how we honor our own rhythm in the midst of life’s noise. It’s how we return home—again and again—to who we really are.

And with my eyes open, that establishment of awareness stays. The silence is right there, able to access as a baseline from which I can take in life and discover what is true from what is simply not mine. It’s a sense of home we get bring with us as we lean into new layers of our expression. It’s what allows me to ride a wave, rather than become absorbed in the narrative.

For it’s the inner knowing that arises from silence that continues to teach me how to meet the moment as it is. Not at the expense of my very human vulnerabilities, not through the absence of noise, but in the ability to be with it all and not fall out of my own flow. It’s how I am able to recognize which wave is mine. And as I feel myself meeting life in motion, it’s what allows me to say: Okay, here it is again. How can I love myself in it?

The real love lives not in the absence of pain, but in the leaning into how we can growth within our edges— how we meet ourselves mid wave. The practice, for me, is that of nurturing an inward connection to silence, while simultaneously engaging in action with the outside world. It’s in the dance of being and activity that we can stretch ourselves without disregulating ourselves.

Just as waves along the ocean will continue to be in flux, the ocean remains. Outside influence, noise, change, even impermanence are constant— but so too is the field of pure silence. As we establish a connection to our beingness, it’s is the greatest gift to be able to then meet the noise with an inner silence, and transcend the limitations we perviously felt owned by.