We can lose connection with our "sound" if we experience over-empathy, people-pleasing, and an "I'm OK if you're OK" filter. This can happen if the nervous system learns to perceive danger and safety by taking responsibility for the well-being and reactions of people (and things) it can't control.

Our creative spirit gets stifled when these patterns settle into our systems. It gets harder to locate our preferences, opinions, and desires. And choices become filtered through their potential social consequences rather than their intrinsic value and importance to us.

Creative spirit has three core elements: sound, noise, and voice.

In this episode of The Gentle Rebel Podcast, we explore the role of sound in each of us and how we can find our way home if we're out of connection.

What does it mean to have a personal sound? Why does it matter? How does it feel? Where is it? How do we find it? What causes us to lose connection with it?

As thinking, feeling, and consciously self-aware creatures, creative spirit flows through our very beingness. It is the invitation to shift the trajectory from what would have happened without us into what COULD happen with us. It stems from the faintest aromas and grows through the slightest cracks of light.

While voice is how we express ourselves in the world, our sound is how we perceive, sense, and notice the world. Sound is the intuitive, creative instincts that precede the interference and noise that clouds it out.

In this episode, we will consider how to attune to this natural and personal part of our being as humans.

Coming To Our Senses

We often talk about someone coming to their senses when they return to sensible compliance and conformity with how they ought to act, think, and approach things. Sometimes, this is necessary, but often, it's a way to keep our sound hidden. It keeps our creative spirit squashed and unable to breathe.

Truly coming to our senses is about recognising our first perceptions, noticing what we notice, including what we are drawn towards and away from before the noisy filters kick in. Filters like social pressures, expectations, and cultural injunctions leave us doing, chasing, and valuing things that don't matter to us and fearing, avoiding, and hiding from the things that do.

If This Isn't Nice, I Don't Know What Is

Kurt Vonnegut's uncle Alex had a saying: "If this isn't nice, I don't know what is." He says, "What Uncle Alex found objectionable about so many human beings is that they would seldom notice when they were happy."

Happiness is a fleeting encounter with something that catches the sleeve of our attention and brings us into harmony with the moment. The mind isn't caught up in rumination and worry. It is present, aware, and alive. It can't be experienced anywhere or anytime other than here and now.

We connect with our sound when we pause to say, "If this isn't nice, I don't know what is."

In her book Anchored, Deb Dana says that "glimmers are all around us, but from a state of protection, they are very hard to find." For many sensitive souls who have developed deep defensive patterns that seek safety by avoiding threats, it can be challenging to notice glimmers. When our nervous systems are stressed, busy, or numb, we are less attuned to the points of connection around us.

Catching Our Sleeve On Our Sound

In his book Several Short Sentences About Writing, Verlyn Klinkenborg writes:

“Is it possible to practice noticing?I think so. But I also think it requires a suspension of yearning. And a pause in the desire to be pouring something out of yourself.Noticing is about letting yourself out into the world,Rather than siphoning the world into you…Noticing means thinking with all your senses.So what is noticing?A pinpoint of awareness,The detail that stands out amid all the details.It’s catching your sleeve on the thorn of the thing youNotice”

What catches your sleeve?