Peaceful mornings
Emma
August 2020
"Silence for me is having peace with my surroundings:
not noticing what is happening around me and focusing on my own being"
It doesn’t have to be completely silent for Emma. She can find silence in music or even in noise: "We’re six in the house and there is always someone making noise when I'm practising yoga but that doesn’t disturb me at all."
A little indecisive when it comes to picking her favourite silence
"Mostly activities where I can close myself off: drawing, reading and yoga. During all three I’m so busy focusing on the act, that I can easily find silence in my head.
If I start focusing on my thoughts I can get restless, so I am trying to learn how to sit and do nothing."
In the end, yoga wins it from drawing and reading:
"Yoga brings me peace because I only focus on my breathing and movements. There is no space left in my head for other things. That really has a healing effect on my mood. After a session I am calm and at peace with myself, that's valuable."
The morning is usually her moment of silence. She likes to be up really early.
"Since January I’m doing yoga almost every morning. I wake up and I roll out my mat. It’s almost the first thing I do and it helps me to start the day well. "
Some musings about silence
Are there any bad sides to silence, like loneliness or boredom?
"I don’t think silence is lonely. I like to be alone and I also think you can be perfectly silent with someone else as well. It’s so powerful if you can feel at ease with someone without feeling the need to fill the silence."
I don’t see silence as anything bad, and I don’t really feel the need to fill every moment with sound. My only exception to that is when someone is eating and it’s silent and all you hear is the nibbling of food. That’s a terrible sound."
"Silence can be boring, but boring is underrated, I don’t mind.
Boring doesn’t mean bad. There’s nothing exciting about doing laundry, but that doesn’t make it stupid."
The last time she heard a deafening silence: "we went to the museum and because of COVID you have to make a reservation beforehand and there is this one artwork, it is an entire room filled with copper confetti - it looks like a galaxy really - and we were the only people in the room and it was just so quiet. "
All in all, the lockdown has had a beneficial effect on yogi Emma.
"The room in my calendar has made room in my head."