Listen

Listen.

To the sounds that aren’t sounds, to the signs that aren’t noise, to the whispers of your soul that aren’t speaking.

We spend so much time, put so much focus, on listening to sounds, to immediate noise and the things that are loudest, and we bypass the actual act of listening.

Listening doesn’t have to mean hearing. The two are not the same and they are not mutually exclusive. You can have one without the other, and that is often the case; we spend so much time hearing, not actually listening.

This morning I felt ‘off’. Out of sorts without knowing the whys. I slept reasonably well, my diet was good yesterday so my gut isn’t unhappy (a state of being I’m well accustomed to), I have good things to look forward to and I’m not particularly stressed about anything, so why the ‘offness’.

Learning to listen to my body is one of the most valuable tools I have gained on my journey, and possibly one of the most difficult to stick to. This morning, despite feeling tired, off, lethargic and generally lazy, I listened to my body, and it wanted to move. It wanted to move with gentle purpose and ground itself into the knowledge that was trying to come forward but was stuck behind layers of distraction and ‘humanness’. Spirit wanted to talk to me but my body was getting in the way. I needed to clear the fog and move that energy out of the way so the wisdom could come forward.

Yoga.

Now, I’m not a yogi by any stretch of the imagination. I have a long and complicated on again off again relationship with yoga and as much as I love it, I find it hard to commit to it…relationships eh?! But I’ve done enough over the years to know the basics, to understand its about the breath, the movement is secondary, and I feel confident enough with what little I do know to put some clearing meditation music on and move on my yoga matt. I tuned into what my body wanted to do. I stopped fixating on what it looked like, even though I knew I was filming the whole thing (which put me out of my comfort zone in any case), I just wanted to feel into the feeling and see what my body wanted to do. No rules. No wrongs. No rights. Just movement.

To feel the prana move with the breath is to feel alive.

Prana is life force. It’s energy. And when we move our bodies just beyond comfortable; not to be in discomfort or uncomfortable, but to feel the movement of the blood flow, to feel that rush of energy throughout our body, to me that is the physical sensation of flow.

Once I shifted my energy with movement, once I felt that rush of flow, of prana, and my body felt good, I sat in stillness for a few minutes and just allowed myself to breathe. I felt every breath flow in and out. Felt the skin of my back and chest move, felt the coolness of the air in my throat, felt the sensations that crept into my spine as it tried soften into this steady rhythm of just breathing.

My ears suddenly became blocked, as though someone had filled them with water. I heard my breath from inside my body, it sounded like the ocean.

I listened.

The message became very clear.

To listen.

Not to the sounds or the voices, not to the words or the music, but to the whispers in between the noise. Listen to the what’s not there. Listen to your body, listen to the Universe, listen to your intuition.

You do not need to be able to ‘hear’ these things to listen to them.

Sound is a small spectrum of frequency that our body can physically hear, but your body is tuned into an abundance of other frequencies that are communicating with you if you stop for a moment and give yourself a chance to listen.

You are a living, walking, talking, receiver, and transmitter of energy. You have the ability to tune into so much more of this world than you can physically comprehend so stop trying to physically comprehend it and just listen. ​