Published:

08/07/2014 11:48pm

Silence in Noise

The bell rang as I was awakened from my slumber. It was 4am and time to get ready for my first meditation of the day. I was in the Blue Mountains of Sydney at theVipassana Centre.

In slow and conscious moves I got dressed and gathered my things to make it to the Meditation Hall behind my sleeping quarters. There would be time for freshening up later.

I learnt the art of meditation from this ten-day program. Joining one hundred othermeditators, the hall smelt of eucalyptus. Dry bark still fresh in my senses, now trigger me into a clean meditative state. I slide right into it easily.

So worried that I would not be able to make it through the vegetarian regime I breezed through it. My next concern was not talking for ten days. Would I make it? I had never done that before.

As my girlfriend and I drove down from the Mountains ten days later we had fallen into the pensive routine of silence. We laughed at how we had lived our lives in the past. Both of us extroverts, we had talked a good portion of the way.

The effort of setting aside time to do this ten-day program had paid off many-fold. As the founder of Vipassana Mr. S. N. Goenka said "you have to spend a critical amount of time to learn a new skill. Most people want to change their lives but are not willing to spend time in our world of instant gratification"

I did this program at the end of every year as a means to cleanse my inner being. Today I am grateful that I did as the art of meditation has transgressed from my mind to muscle, from understanding the discourses to living them.

Many years later I moved from Sydney to Singapore. The pace of my life multiplied many fold. The hectic pace of Asian life and the travel that I began to do, shook my work-life balance.

Having been trained in Neuro Linguistic Programming I knew how to step out of the content of an experience into the context and structure of it. This is where even further value started to occur for me.

The irony of finding silence in noise was an incredible insight for me. As I was thrown even further into a noisy world of consulting jobs, after work parties, good food and wine, I found myself stepping out into the silence.

I would smell the bark of eucalyptus, which had become an anchor for me. This would take me straight into a calm, meditative state. How cool was that? More and more I learnt to step out of the noise into the silence.

I found silence worked for me in tremendous ways. I could create from nothing. My intuition would throw thoughts into my consciousness. Solutions came to me.

My meditation practice came in handy in many ways. I didn't suffer jet lag. I was able to command my unconscious mind to sleep when I needed to. When I ran at a fast pace at work I stopped and sat in stillness and silence. I became present to the stress in my body and whooshed it away.

I know that the combination of meditation, being still and seeing context in a situation is very powerful for results. My performance is heightened and results are achieved without trying. An aura of peace and calm also envelope my being. I am able to attend to any situation however negative it may seem.

My silent state has a vacuum-like feel inside me. This is coupled with a light blue color and a soft whistling sound. As I understand the building blocks of my internal experience I am able to access this state any time anywhere.

I know successful people have a strong semblance of what occurs in their internal world. They are thoroughly aware of how to manage their state of mind for high performance.

This is fundamental to achieving success in a person's life. State management sits at the heart of NLP. If you are able to change your state, you are able to change your behavior. A change of behavior in turn then changes your results.

Sylvia Fernandes is the Founder & CEO of VIA Frontiers. She is also the author of soon to be launched book called Bye Bye Black Cat - Turn Your Luck Around to Realise Opportunities. She has been operating in the Asia Pacific Region for the last 12 years and is currently based in Singapore. Go to www.viafrontiers.com for more information.