How Silence Became My Medicine | Spirituality+Health
I don’t remember when the noise became my shield; when I stopped listening within and started drowning in sound. All I know is that I woke up one day and couldn’t hear myself anymore. Not in a dramatic, movie-scene way. Just … quietly. Slowly. Like static. Like distance.
It started with chatter: filling every pause, saying yes to plans I didn’t want, laughing too loudly, keeping the music turned up even when my ears ached. It continued with motion, running from room to room, from one obligation to another, convincing myself that if I stayed busy, distracted, surrounded, then maybe the silence wouldn’t find me, and I wouldn’t have to sit with the weight of the many things that streaked through my mind about my life.
False Sense of Safety
What I didn’t know was that I was mistaking noise for safety. I thought constant motion was the same as living. I thought distraction was the same as healing. I thought that if I kept talking, kept moving, kept performing, then maybe the ache inside me would quiet down. It didn’t. It hid beneath the volume. Wounds don’t vanish in noise; they just wait for the hush. I got very good at avoiding that hush.
Healing didn’t come to me like a revelation. It came in stillness—in mornings when the world was asleep and the only sound was my breath. In afternoons when I finally turned my phone off and sat with the weight of my own thoughts. In evenings when silence wrapped around me like an unfamiliar blanket.
At first, it felt unbearable. Like emptiness. Like loss. But slowly, quietly, it became medicine. Silence doesn’t erase the wound. It gives it space to surface. To breathe. To mend.
There was a time I thought silence was punishment. Now, silence no longer frightens me. It holds me. It neither demands performance nor rushes me forward. It simply stays—steady, patient, whole.
In its presence, I remember who I am without the noise. Not a reflection of everyone else’s chaos, not an echo of their demands—just myself, breathing.
The Smallest Rituals of Stillness
Silence taught me that healing isn’t about becoming louder or clearer; it’s about becoming true. So when life overwhelms me, I turn to the smallest rituals of stillness.
Sometimes I calm down alone and breathe slowly until my thoughts loosen their grip. Other times I take quiet walks with no music, touching grass, letting the earth remind me I belong here. When the ache runs deep, I allow myself to sleep, letting pain evaporate instead of harden. In the mornings, I run. What once made my heart race with panic is now met by the rhythm of my own footsteps, the steady pounding of a heartbeat I chose. Even fear softens when I face it head-on, when I meet it with motion, with breath, with presence.
Some days I simply clean my room in silence, turning chaos into order, channeling my heaviest emotions into something good and tangible. These are not dramatic practices, but ordinary ones: walking, breathing, sleeping, running, cleaning. Each is a way to sit with myself, evaluate my choices, and respond with clarity instead of fear. Each is how silence became medicine to me.
The more I have practiced these small rituals, the more silence has opened itself as a teacher. I have not only learned to calm down in the moment; I’ve begun to understand who I am beneath the noise.
What Silence Has Taught Me
Silence has taught me to sit with myself long enough to notice my patterns, weigh my choices, and respond in ways that push me forward instead of causing me to retreat in fear. It has given me the room to evaluate—to ask myself what I actually feel and answer in a way that aligns with who I want to be.
I am not unscarred, but I am softer where I once was sharp. I am present where I once was scattered. I am listening where I once tuned out. Maybe this is the new shape of healing: not triumph, not certainty, but silence. The kind that roots you, that steadies your breath until you feel alive again. The kind that makes room for both ache and peace without asking you to choose between them.
I don’t know exactly who I’m becoming. But I know she is born in the hush between moments. I know she lives in every pause I allow myself. I know she is already here—in the stillness, in the presence, in the quiet mercy of peace.
And that is enough. More than enough.