Shedding scarves and jackets, pants and shirts are difficult. Our ego mind tenaciously holds on to its right to exist, the part of us that remembers things, replays conversations in our mind, causes we stand for, our need to be right – – unwilling to relinquish the goal of getting our way.
So much of our energy and our life force devoted to efforts ‘out there’, all the different rabbit holes our mind may travel down, and we willingly follow every single one of them to the bitter end, often to discover there is no end. The more wrapped up we become in our words, the tighter we become in our thoughts, the tighter we become inside with our desire to be heard or to be understood, the further we move away from ourselves.
But the more we cultivate silence, the more we are able to allow thoughts to be like clothing, to picture them like streamers that unwrap and flow out into the wind, the more we will be able to discover what is underneath, what has been kept hidden, even from ourselves.
There is freedom in dancing naked within ourselves, a freedom to let go of the pressure to be a certain way, to think certain things, to do the correct thing, to conform to social expectations, or roles that we’ve come to believe are who we are. Standing naked within ourselves in the silence, we realize that everything that we’ve wrapped around ourselves, everything that other people have wrapped around us, isn’t real. Who are we?