Silence: A Personal Update

Hey everyone, this is Adam Elenbaas from Nightlight Astrology, and today I am going to be sharing a little personal update about my spiritual journey, and you might ask why would you do this because we're just here for the astrology. I like to be transparent with people about what kind of spiritual practices inform the way that I create content and the way that I create everything, from the curriculum that I develop and the way that I teach my programs or the content I create to the way I do my readings.

I've always tried to let my audience know what my spiritual approach is, in addition to, you know, astrological approach. Since I left the world of bhakti yoga last fall, you know, I've gotten a lot of questions from people being like, what are you doing now? What are your practices? How have they changed? I know that for some people, you've actually, like, a good amount of people on this channel, tried Montreux meditation because I recommended it. So, I just thought I'd take today to tell you a little bit about how my spiritual practice has changed and evolved. You know, I think in many ways, I'm still the same person; I still have a lot of the same spiritual values, but my practices have changed a little bit.

So I thought I would take a moment to answer the I don't know, probably a couple of 100 times that I've been asked, What are you doing now? Since last fall? What are your daily practices like? What is your daily routine like, and has anything shifted in terms of your overall beliefs? So I know that some people are interested in an update; this week has been kind of low astrologically, a bit of just not many transits happening. So when that's the case, I try to put in some interesting episodes that maybe I've been meaning to catch up on or things I've been meaning to address for a while but haven't been able to. So that's what we're doing today.

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Okay, so what is my spiritual practice? It's been silence. I started last summer as I was, I would say, in the process of making the transition from the bhakti yoga tradition. Or at least I was making the transition out of it, and I wasn't really sure where my faith path would take me. I still don't know, you know. I'm not; I don't feel like now I'm something new, and I can label it.

I started attending Quaker meetings here in Minneapolis, and the Quaker practice is pretty simple. You get together with a group of people like a church service, but everyone comes into the room and is totally silent for an hour, and then everyone gets up and leaves. It sounds kind of crazy, right? Well, I want to tell you about what this has done for me and how I've incorporated it into my life, and you know how it's the same but different from things I've been I've done in the past. And again, I'm doing this because I've had so many people ask me, and at a certain point, I feel like I wanted to give an update just to let people know like this is your astrologer who does this spiritually speaking. This is like his orientation and how he practices, and that practice is fundamental to the process that goes into content creation every day.

So, the Quakers get together in silence. Now, I'm just going to put this on my own terms. So if there are any Quakers out there listening, please, please don't take offense if I'm not speaking the jargon well enough. That the basic idea is that in that silence, we wait attentively and listen for the voice of God, for the presence of God to commune with that presence, or sometimes to receive, you know, wisdom or instruction or insight to pray to, you know, talk to God. But often, just the listening, just the listening for that divine spark to appear.

It reminds me a lot of when I was in graduate school for creative writing, something that my teachers would say, and this is a common thing for writers sit down and write every day; you have to wait, you have to show up to write as though you're like, I'm here, and muse Are you there? You know. I think there was a famous talk that Elizabeth Gilbert once gave on creativity and writing that was very similar to what my MFA instructor said to show up every day; sometimes, the creative inspiration will be there, and sometimes it won't, but you have to attend to it.

So there's a devotional quality to listening to showing up in silence. This is not the kind of silence that is about trying to be silent and clear the mind and not think like meditation. It's more exactly like what it sounds like. It's about silent, quiet listening. That's how I would describe it thus far. And I'm not; I'm just been working in the Quaker space for, you know, about a year. But it's just listening, and I would say it's listening to spirit or source or God or the divine, or the Christ consciousness. Quakerism comes from a Christian background, but it is almost like nondoctrinal; there are no real doctrines or dogmas.

It is, you know, as far as I can, I've experienced, there tends to be an agreement among Quakers about things like pacifism, and they tend to be politically progressive and more liberal and stuff like that. But generally speaking, it's just about silence and listening and waiting for a source or God to speak and move within you and deliberately learning how to listen and commune with God in quiet in what I would call a kind of reflective, attentive listening.

So there are some gifts that I have noticed that have come along with this practice. So I go Wednesday nights; I do generally go. Though, sometimes we go as a family on Sunday mornings, and then daily, I try to take some time to just sit and listen. It's not a structured thing. Like I sit on a mat or, you know, stare at a drishti focal point or work on my breathing, it's nothing like that. It's literally I could just sit on my couch here; I could literally just sit down on the couch and, with my eyes open, just listen. Listen to the sounds around me and then listen layers and layers deeper to the divine within, and that's a communion.

Sometimes it's often like, there might be a few post-it notes that are given to me or something, you know, but it's what it has in common with bhakti. So I bring that into my daily life every day. Generally, before I create content, I take some time to listen, to just be quiet and listen, and commune with the divine. The comparison to bhakti is that it's a devotional practice, and it's about relational bonding with God, but it's through the medium of silence now in bhakti, it's through mantra meditation through reciting the names of God, which is also beautiful.

I don't think there's one that's better than another inherently; I think they're just different tools, I guess you could say. In both, there is a sense that communion relationship love and developing a reflective capacity is important. And so, in some ways, you know, I still consider myself a bhakta. But my devotional path has changed in its expression.

So I would say the gifts, there's five of them that I wrote down. One that I've really enjoyed about this, that and this these are, you know, everyone has a different wiring point. You know, I think when it comes to religion or spiritual or religious experience, we're all wired differently, you know; we all have different religious psychologies, I think. And so the way that this has been positive for me thus far has been that something, there's something about silence, about just sitting with others in silence to where there's nothing that's being taught doctrinally or philosophically, or there's no dogma that's being presented, it's purely about silent connection to God, in a group and individually.

Since I was a little kid, I grew up in the church with a dad who had a doctorate in theology, right? So I grew up within a family that was deeply philosophical; you know, my mom is a psychiatric nurse practitioner and also had a master's degree in clinical psychology. So she's, you know, what my family was, like, well educated and like, there was a lot of philosophy in the air, you know, and I don't feel bad about that at all. It set me on a path, you know, and for that; I'm eternally grateful. But over the years, it's like teachings, doctrines, dogmas, and ideas, they collect and what I've learned from the silence, and one of the main reasons that I left the bhakti tradition is that I found myself increasingly overwhelmed by the philosophical density of the Vedic world in general.

I don't mean any offense by that, because I think it for some people, it's like, you know, some people like perfume that's like, or like cologne that's like dense and rich and complex, you know and, some people like things that are airier and lighter and subtler or something. So I don't think of this as right or wrong, as much as I think about it as religious aesthetics or religious, psychological differences. But I found that, for me, being in the bhakti world frequently was overwhelming because of how much philosophy and doctrine, and dogma there was. I don't mean that negatively, either. I don't.

There was a lot of it that was super beautiful, and I really, really appreciated some of it. Not just from the bhakti tradition, but from a whole, you know, decades before that of reading philosophy and being, you know, sort of indoctrinated in the Christian church and everything. What I found is that something about the silence, and it started last summer, just started emptying me off, like, certainty, okay? I don't have to be certain about anything to know that I love and want to be connected to the source or God, the divine, whatever word you want to give it, herself.

So the first thing that silence has done for me, which was, it is deeply therapeutic, is to sort of empty the cup of doctrine and dogmas. And when that's empty, then it can be filled with communion with God, and I believe that the same thing can happen for people and often does happen for people through chanting mantra meditation. So it's not like I am not trying to condemn anything. By contrast, to receiving feedback. One of the things that I like about silence is that it's very permissive. I needed to feel like God was giving me permission to live a life. To do this, I make sure that I sit down with God regularly and ask for feedback.

You know, and this is just my own wiring, there's always been more; it's always been more of a challenge to just live a life that's not rooted in how it ought to be lived, an ideal, like, platonic sense of what is real or true or good or beautiful or godly. And what I like about the silence, what it's been doing, for me so far has been to just It's as though the silence when I show up, and I start listening, the silence is always saying, You've been living a life, and you've been making choices, and that's what your life is for. And it's also good, and I'm so glad that you're here to listen and hear feedback. Feedback is not you've been getting it right or wrong. Feedback is just a conversation about how you're living your life. That's a huge shift for me. And it's, it sounds really simple. For a lot of people, you'll be like, Duh, you know, but for me, that was huge.

Number three, with silence and just listening, there are no techniques, my mind might be full of stuff, and I might be having a hard time listening. But then it turns out that that's, that's what I needed to hear it, So I can't explain it. It's like, in many ways, I think meditation prayers of all different traditions all around the world can accomplish the same things that can bring us into the same communion with our source or can have a positive benefit somehow. One of the things I love about the Quakers is that there's no technique; it's not like, Okay, well, when you're there, breathe, empty your mind of everything, connect with God by, you know, going below your thoughts, and then observing your thoughts. And you know, there's no, there's no instructions. It's just literally sit down and listen and see what comes up. And I love that because I have been someone I attribute this somewhat to my moon and Capricorn in the ninth house, who's always like, Okay, what's the technique? How do I master it? How do I perfect it? Like, I'm kind of a creature of habit and discipline. And this has been something that's helped me go. I don't know beyond that. I'm definitely still trapped in it in many ways, but it's just softened things a little bit, I guess.

Number four is that, and this is similar. I, I was really struggling with the feeling that it was embarrassing to it to admit this. But you know that spiritually, I'm not being serious about my spirituality unless I have a daily practice. And this has been like, oh, there's so much pride in that. And I think it's good to have spiritual practices. And many people can carry your spiritual practice without being wrapped up in like oughts and shoulds, and pride and ego. But for me, there was some complicated wiring there between daily practices, and like, your self-worth, or my self-worth, or your spiritual merit, like I struggled with feeling that I should ever create any kind of content that would be valuable to anyone without first having done a practice. And although I would say that listening, and you could call it a kind of practice, but it's changed for me in that I don't wake up every day, I'm like, Okay, I gotta do my practice. So that, you know, I make sure that my, the content I create is good, and that I'm a good dad, and it's just shifted from, like getting it right and being good to, like, just sitting down and learning how to be reflective and, and open and curious.

And like, like sitting down and listening, for me. Even talking about it right now at the start, you know, it's starting to feel like it almost takes away from what it is because it's like the word How many times have I said the word listening, and I don't even think about that word that often. Like, I'll literally just sit on my couch and be quiet. And maybe I'm fidgeting. Maybe my mind is busy. But often, if I just sit there for a while, I start to feel the divine just; it just comes, and it's easier. It's less rigid, and it's been more about, you know, it's helped me to focus on the quality of my consciousness and how to present that quality in me than whether or not I've checked off my practice for the day.

My practices for many years, as you guys know, who followed me for a while, have been pretty rock steady. Not perfect, but like, you know, pretty consistent. And they've been those practices have been full of a lot of magic and insight. And like they've been tremendously helpful for me. So I don't also mean to say that, like, the practices were just rigid, and they didn't do anything positive. They did a lot of positive things. But now, I would say that they're doing positive things, but I'm less, I'm less focused on the positive things that they're doing and less attached to them, and I'm trying to just live a life and, you know, include time for reflection and communion with God. But not because they need to get anything, right? Not because it makes everything better. But just because it's a nice thing to do. And that's been a huge shift for me. Again, I'm sure some of you guys are like, this is so basic, but I, for me, these have been hard things to learn.

Number five, One of the things that I love about the Quaker meetings is that sometimes people occasionally people will speak during the silence. To share an insight that's come up in the silence that feels like it is a message for everyone. And it's really amazing to see. To watch the people there demonstrate such care. It's not like people just, you know, pop off at the mouth, you know, it's like, it's pretty rare that people talk. Occasionally, someone will say something like a message that they have an insight that they've received, and they feel like it's divinely inspired, and they want to share it with a group. And it's not long; it's usually, like, maybe a minute at max that someone's talking. And it has been really, really profound to just hear such simple, joyful, helpful, divinely inspired insights, I would say, from people who have made it a practice like they're ago, who have made it a part of their life to be reflective and create listening spaces.

So I have really been enjoying it, and it's funny because it carries over, like, when I'm, when I listen to people talk in any other context. I can tell when people are speaking from a place of having considered something, having sat with it, even, you know, you just catch it when people pause, a beat to really take in something. And then they find the right words in there. But there's a carefulness, and I can tell when people have the ability to listen based on how they speak. And I can tell when I'm not in a listening space based on how I hear myself speak. So this has been a really, really nice thing. I've really enjoyed that piece of it. I'm sure that all of these insights would be compatible or similar for people in many other traditions, too. So this is not a please go join a Quaker service. I don't even know if I want to be a Quaker, you know what I mean? Like I don't, I'm just going, like, just I like enjoy going. That's it.

So anyway, that is the update. For those of you who had no interest in hearing about this, I apologize for wasting time. But for those of you who, again, have asked so nicely, how are you doing? What are your practices like now? I've kind of followed you and was doing mantra meditation, curious to know what's changing. I know that people, you know, have an interest. So I thought I should do an update. And especially since it's a quiet week, astrologically felt like the right time to do it. So that is what I've got for today; I hope that you are having a great day. And, you know, take take a few minutes to sit down and be quiet sometimes and just listen, see what happens for me. It's been very magical. Maybe it would be for you, too. Who knows. But you can know that every day that when I make my content, I'm not sitting down with such a rigorous practice anymore, but there is the sweet space of listening that's come in. And I think it's doing very similar things in my life, the different forms of prayer and meditation I've done over the years. And hopefully, still, you can still feel the care that's infused into the work that comes from that, although it's a little different. It's a little different vibration, I guess. I don't know. Anyway, thank you so much for listening. I hope you guys have a great day, and we will see you again later. Take it easy, everyone. Bye.