Presence, Silence, Openness and Peace

For more than fourteen years, I have been observing my thoughts. I never believed that presence meant having fewer thoughts. Thoughts were part of my inner world, and I learned to witness them without trying to eliminate them.

What changed recently was not my relationship to thought, but my experience of silence. A silent mind appeared naturally, and with it came a deep peace. Spacious. Simple. Uncomplicated. I felt how beautiful it was when nothing required my mental involvement.

And I became attached to that peace.

Not because I wanted control, but because it felt like relief. Relief from something I had not clearly identified yet.

Around that same time, I simplified my external input. I stopped listening to podcasts while driving, cooking, showering, or brushing my teeth. I might listen to one podcast in a day, but only that. No constant layering of information. I reduced social media almost entirely. I began doing one thing at a time.

At first, there was more quiet. My breath felt deeper. I felt more present.

But what really happened was not just peace. What really happened is that I could finally feel myself.

Because I was no longer numbing my sensations with constant information, I became more aware of my thoughts, my emotions, my body. I was no longer escaping into other people’s voices. I was sitting in my own nervous system.

And that is when I discovered something I had never clearly seen before.

I rush.

Not dramatically. Not in panic. But constantly. I rush while brushing my teeth. I rush while cleaning the house. I rush while getting dressed. I rush while driving. I rush while working. There was always a subtle sense of urgency in my body, as if something was slightly ahead of me.

I had lived like this my entire life and never fully noticed it. The distractions had covered it. Productivity justified it. Information numbed it.

Only when I stopped filling every space did I realize that urgency was always there.

That urgency was my baseline.

A baseline is the nervous system tone you return to when nothing special is happening. It is how your body feels when you are not stimulated, not entertained, not reacting. Most of us do not know our baseline because we rarely allow ourselves to sit without input.

When I reduced stimulation, I met mine.

And mine was slightly mobilized.

This explained something important about highs and lows. If your baseline carries tension, moments of joy feel very high in comparison. But when the joy fades, you return to baseline, and that return feels like a drop.

It is not that happiness is wrong. It is that the nervous system returns to what feels normal.

I began realizing that I was not seeking extreme happiness. I was seeking regulation. I wanted a steady, open baseline that felt alive but not urgent.

As I looked deeper, I recognized something from my past. There was always a sense in my body that if I was not fast enough, something would go wrong. Not as a mental sentence, but as a physical orientation.

Speed meant safety.

I see it in ordinary moments. When I am activated and someone drives very slowly in front of me, something in my body reacts. There is irritation, not because they are wrong, but because my system interprets slowness as delay, and delay as risk.

When I am present and regulated, it does not bother me. When I am stressed, it does.

Slowness is not the issue. Activation is.

Another important shift happened in how I relate to my inner experience. For years, I focused very precisely. Focus on the thought. Focus on the sensation. Focus on the emotion. My attention was intentional but narrow.

Now I am learning something different.

Instead of narrowing attention, I widen awareness. I allow one awareness to hold everything at once. Thoughts, sensations, emotions, sounds, circumstances. Multiple experiences, one field of awareness.

That awareness feels wide and stable. It does not collapse into any one thing.

And in that widening, something became very clear.

I am not that peace I experienced in silence. I am awareness itself. Peace is not my identity. Peace is what happens when awareness is not contracted.

That realization changed everything.

What I truly value is not silence. It is openness.

Openness means I can be with someone speaking to me, with a television playing, with unexpected events arising, without needing reality to be different. It is a receptive state that does not resist what is here.

Openness can become baseline.

And when openness becomes baseline, highs are not overwhelming and lows are not threatening. Experience still moves, but there is steadiness underneath.

Updating baseline does not require extreme change. I do not need to eliminate thoughts. I do not need to move slowly all the time. I do not need to force constant calm.

I can move five percent slower.

I can lengthen my exhale slightly.

I can allow activation to rise without immediately acting from it.

Each time nothing collapses, my nervous system learns something new.

Safety is not philosophy. It is not positive thinking. It is a felt experience inside the body. Peace is not something I impose on my mind. It is what emerges when my nervous system no longer feels like it must be in emergency mode.

And that safety is built gently, through repeated embodied experience.

Today I felt stress while working on business decisions. I felt the rush clearly. I observed it. I completed what needed to be done. I moved my body consciously afterward. Now there is no contraction left in my chest or throat.

That is progress.

Not the absence of stress, but the ability to metabolize it.

If you are reading this, I invite you to ask yourself a simple question. When stimulation decreases, when you are not distracted or entertained, what does your body feel like?

What is your baseline?

Sometimes the most important transformation is not reaching higher states. It is gently updating the place you return to.

For me, that place is becoming openness.

And that feels like freedom.

Katiana