Root & Rise reflection
The Noise You Live In, and the Ten Seconds That End It
I want to introduce you to a part of yourself you already know but rarely notice.
Right now, as you read this, you're having thoughts. Maybe about the sentence itself. Maybe about the ten other things waiting for you today. Your mind is doing what minds do, jumping from one thing to the next without asking permission.
But there's something else happening at the same time. Something noticing all of that. Watching the thoughts arrive and pass. Not judging them, not fixing them, just aware of them.
That noticing is not a thought. It doesn't change the way your thoughts change. An hour from now you might feel confident, then doubtful, then driven, then tired. All of that shifts constantly. But the part of you that's aware of the shifting stays exactly the same the whole time.
I call that awareness. Some people call it presence. The name matters less than the fact that you can check it for yourself, right now, in your own experience. You don't need to believe me. Just notice you're aware of reading this. Then notice you're also aware of noticing that. That's it. That's the whole thing.
The noisy part, and the quiet part underneath it
Here's the split that changes everything once you see it. There's the noisy part of you, the thoughts, and there's the quiet part underneath, the awareness itself. Most of us live our whole life inside the noisy part. We think the anxious voice is us. We think the story that says we're not enough, not there yet, not doing enough, is a fact about our life instead of just one more thought passing through, like a car going by outside.
I see this all the time with the people I work with. Pain rarely comes from what actually happened. It comes from arguing with what happened. The noisy part won't let it go. It keeps saying this shouldn't be this way, I should be further along by now, I should have handled that better. But whatever happened has already happened. You can't win an argument with something that's already over.
Here's what most people get backwards. Confidence, peace, feeling like you're already enough, none of that lives in the noisy part. You can't think your way into it, because thinking is the noisy part's job. Arguing is its job. Worrying is its job. Feeling settled has never once been its job, so it's never going to hand that to you. That lives underneath, in the quiet part. You've felt it before even if you never named it. Those rare moments you weren't trying to feel confident, you just did. You weren't chasing peace, you were just in it. That wasn't luck. That was you, slipping under the noise into the part that was holding you up the whole time.
You get there by practicing, not by figuring it out
So how do you actually get from the noisy part to the quiet part. Not by reasoning your way there. You get there the same way you'd build any muscle, you use it. You practice going back to it, and it gets stronger and easier to find every single time.
That's mindfulness, without the incense and the jargon. It's just the simple, repeatable act of noticing the thought. That's the whole move, nothing more complicated than that. You are the one noticing it, and that alone is enough. Every time you do that, you're building the one thing that hands you confidence, love, and peace on purpose, instead of waiting around to stumble into them by accident.
Trust works the same way. The awareness has been with you your whole life. It was there before the anxious thought showed up this morning, and it'll still be there long after that thought is gone. It has never once let you down. The thoughts, on the other hand, lie to you constantly. They tell you you're behind. They tell you you're not enough. They tell you love and success are things you have to earn before you're allowed to feel whole. The more you practice noticing, the more obvious it gets which one of the two actually deserves your trust.
And here's the part that changes how you see other people
If that same noticing awareness is in you, it's in everyone else too. Not a similar version of it. The same one. Every stranger you pass on the street, every person you love, every person who frustrates you beyond reason, has that exact same quiet awareness underneath their noise, just like you do.
That's why loving someone else and loving yourself were never actually two different things. When you soften toward another person, something in you softens too. When you stop being at war with yourself, you find you have less war left over for anyone else. The separation between you and them was always the story. The awareness was never separate to begin with.
What I want you to do with this
You don't need to overhaul anything to start. You need one small habit. In mindfulness, it's called noting. Next time a thought convinces you that you're behind, or not enough, or that someone else is the enemy, pause and note it. Just name it, thinking. You are the one noticing that thought. That's the whole practice, nothing more.
It sounds too small to matter, but that's the point. The journey of a thousand miles starts with a single step, and this is that step. Every time you note a thought instead of living inside it, you strengthen the same muscle that eventually brings you home to yourself. Do it enough times and it stops being a rare accident and starts being somewhere you can go on purpose.
One honest caveat. Noting won't rewrite a belief that keeps generating the same noise on a loop, the one underneath it telling you that you have to earn love, or that you're not enough until you achieve the next thing. Changing that takes a different kind of work, going in and actually changing the belief itself, not just noticing it. But noting will do something real while that belief is still there. It stops you from living inside the thought.
Everything you're chasing, the confidence, the peace, the sense of being enough, was never somewhere out ahead of you. It was underneath the noise the entire time. You just have to keep taking the next step back to it.
Marjan 🌿