At midnight, in a space of relative silence, I hear my lesser angels in my head. Amber received a text just before I turned off the lamp—an innocuous text as it were—and my noggin was a veritable spin cycle.

I was right.

Another was wrong.

What I’d say if I had the chance.

How the other would react.

I was right.

Another was wrong…

For over an hour, I turned thoughts over like stones, one after an other, always circling back to the first stone. I turned in the covers too, tossed in them like a madman. Nearing midnight, I cursed myself, cursed sleep, the bed, the damned cell phone that started it all. And when I’d run out of curses, I reached for the rosary by my bed, held the crucifix, and turned to rote recitation. The Lord’s Prayer. Once. Twice. Twenty times I said that prayer until the only thing filling the space where my thoughts had been was bread, forgiveness, the sense of being delivered from my own evil. In that filling, my blood cooled, my breathing deepened, and I fell into the fitful ocean of dreams.

Silence—it creates space for our lesser angels to speak and speak and speak and speak. Rage, heartache, dejection—they all come calling in the silence. And in those moments, we need strategies to find relief from our own heads.

A Strategy for the Times of Silence—Pick a prayer, a mantra, a saying. Perhaps it’s the Lord’s Prayer, or the Jesus Prayer, or an E.E. Cummings poem, or some phrase your mother whispered over you each night before you fell asleep as a child. Repeat that phrase again and again until it pushes the voices out, until it fills every space. Practice it for 7 minutes today, 10 minutes tomorrow, and 15 minutes the next day. Practice when you lie down to sleep. See what comes.

***

Wait… wait… Don’t leave!

My next book, The Book of Waking Up: Experiencing the Divine Love that Reorders a Life is available for pre-order NOW. (Amazon, Barnes & Noble) It’s a book that explores how to wake from our lesser angels—the voices, addictions, dependencies we attach to—and how to attach to and adore Divine Love. Pre-orders are vital to the success of a book, because retailers determine demand (and thus marketing) based on pre-order volume. So please do not wait. Order today. And if you do, let me know via email. I’ll send you a sample along with the 3-part video series that gave rise to this book!

*Photo taken with the Fujifilm X100S. For behind the scenes content join the inner circle.