Tag Archives: Caroline Myss

The Quality of Silence

Posted on by Michelle Mains

Have you ever met someone who won’t stop talking?  Not someone who has dementia.  Or someone telling their funniest stories when they meet new people or on a first date.  I mean people who spend 20 minutes telling you something they mentioned 3 days before.

I read an interesting article which stated that sometimes people will repeat themselves simply as a way of being heard.  It gave me a whole new perspective.  Possibly they did not receive attention or acknowledgement in their family of origin; to be heard, they needed to do things again and again.  (We’ve all heard the poor 5 year old in the grocery store – “Mom. Mom. Mom. Mom,” while the mother ignores him.)  Some people carry this habit into adulthood, not realizing the wearing effect it can have on people around them.

I’ve been frustrated by conduct like this, but I found a surprising silver lining.  It caused me to realign my behavior of needing to get my point across.  Sometimes listening to someone for the third time that week is simply polite, but other times it’s simply saving your breath with someone who’s more interested in talking than hearing your response.

Are you someone who has to have the last word?  Articulate about making your point, but unrelenting?  Joyce Meyer once laughed that she was the kind of Mom who would lecture her teenagers for 20 minutes, go to the kitchen to get a glass of water, think of something else, and then go back and start in again (usually while they rolled their eyes at her).

Maybe the thought for the week is finding peace in silence.  Knowing that there can be as much elegance in keeping quiet and saving your energy as in stating your opinion.  I’ll leave you with a quote from Caroline Myss:

Contain your experience with the Divine
so that it does not escape you but rather shapes you.
Be silent.
Silence will help you avoid engaging in the games of competition and illusion
that regularly seduce us in the outside world.
Silence also helps you avoid distraction.
It helps focus the busy mind -
the mind that always has to be doing something, thinking something,
the mind that always has to be otherwise engaged
lest it become introspective and allow the soul’s voice to override its own.
The silence I am describing is a silence that you use
to contain the grace you receive when you enter the Castle of your soul.
This quality of silence allows you to engage in discernment.
You carry this silence within you, even when you are with others.
It allows you to hold your center amid the chaos of your life;
it keeps you clear so that you do not do or say things you will regret
or make decisions out of fear.

Know Better, Do Better

Posted on by Michelle Mains

I’ve really been enjoying Oprah Winfrey’s new show, Oprah’s Lifeclass.  At one point last week, she mentioned one of her favorite quotes from Maya Angelou: “When you know better, you do better.”

This statement has given me heartburn for quite a while.  On its face, it seems reasonable.  But I wrestled with it over several years, trying to figure out why it bothered me.  Then it hit me – I’ve met a lot of people who know better, but don’t do better.  While Maya’s statement seems obvious, it flies in the face of our often entitled culture.

Earlier this year, medical intuitive Caroline Myss told a fascinating story on her radio show at Hay House Radio.  She counseled a woman who had diabetes.  Toward the end of the session, they talked about exercise.  She remembered something like, It may be obvious, but you need to exercise every day, in addition to making the diet changes we’ve discussed.  It may not be fun, or something you want to do, but it’s absolutely necessary if you’re going to be well.

The woman looked at her, gave her advice a couple of minutes of thought, and then blurted out, “Well, I’m not going to do that.”

Caroline stated that she was absolutely stunned by her candor.  On the other hand, she was completely impressed.  Most of the time she sees a lot of nodding heads from her clients, and yet knows they will not follow her guidance once they leave.  This client was absolutely clear that she had no intention of following the advice.

A perfect example of knowing better, yet not wanting to do better.  For a variety of reasons – it’s too hard, it’s inconvenient, you’re asking too much from me, etc.  I began to understand that I disagreed with any inference of an automatic, causal relationship between knowing better and doing better.  Ideally and certainly there should be.  But not always necessarily.

On last week’s show, Oprah used a slightly different phrase at one point.  “When you know better, you can do better.”  Ahhhhhh, yes, absolutely.  In the words of Mohandas Ghandi, “The difference between what we’re doing and what we are capable of doing would solve most of the world’s problems.”