“We spend a lot of time looking for happiness when the world right around us is full of wonder. To be alive and to be on the Earth is a miracle, and yet most of us are running away from the present moment as if there some better place to go. There is a beauty calling to us every day, every hour, but we are rarely in a position to listen. The basic condition for us to be able to hear the call of beauty and respond to it is silence. If we don’t have silence in ourselves, if in our mind, our body, is full of noise, then we can’t hear beauty’s call. There’s a radio playing in our head, Radio Station NST: Non-Stop Thinking. Our mind is filled with noise, and that’s why we can’t hear the call of life, the call of love. Our heart is calling us, but we don’t hear. We don’t have the time to listen to our hearts. Mindfulness is the practice that quiets the noise inside us. Without mindfulness, we can be pulled away from many things. Sometimes we are pulled away by regret and sorrow concerning our past. We revisit old memories and experiences, only to suffer again and again the pain we’ve already experienced. It’s easy to get caught in the prison of the past. We may also get pulled away by the future. A person who is anxious and fearful about the future is trapped just as much as one bound by the past. Anxiety, fear and uncertainty about our future events prevent us from hearing the call of happiness. So, the future becomes a kind of prison too. Even if we try to be in the present moment, many of us are distracted and feel empty, as if we had a vacuum inside. We may long for something, expect something a bit more exciting. We anticipate something that will change the situation, because we see the situation in the present moment as boring—nothing special, nothing interesting. Mindfulness is often described as a bell that reminds us to stop and listen silently. We can use an actual bell or any other cue that helps us remember to not be carried away by the noise around and inside us. When we hear the bell, we stop and embrace the silence. Removing the incessant chatter in our minds. We follow our in-breath and out out-breath, making space for silence. We say to ourselves, “Breathing in, I know that I’m breathing in.” Breathing in and mindfully paying attention to only the breath allows us to quiet all the noise within us, the chattering about the past, the future and the longing for something more.”
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