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March 17, 2024 18 mins

Welcome to the 12th episode of the "Conquer Your Mountains" podcast. In this episode, titled "Finding Peace and Silence in a Noisy World," where we aim to encourage you to pursue tranquility, even in tumultuous times. 

Tune in as Amanda de Witt from LUCA, the Faith and Inspiration imprint of Penguin Random House, South Africa, chats with author and CEO Dr. Mandla Moyo about how they perceive peace and silence in our bustling world. They also discuss the need to find moments that allow you to recharge and reconnect with your authentic self. Moreover, Dr. Mandla reflects on the seven different types of rest that we need to remain sane.

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Click here to access the podcast in a platform of your choice, such as Spotify and Apple Podcasts https://tr.ee/Kz8U7B2wiq 

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Technology is a double-edged sword in our pursuit of peace and silence. It helps us to live our lives efficiently but often becomes a source of constant, unwanted noise. In this episode, Dr. Mandla advises listeners to be mindful of the potential negative influences technology can have on peace and tranquility. He suggests the best way to lessen these effects is by practicing restraint or limiting its use, especially during supposed rest periods.

They also share how different cultures perceive silence and the varying degrees of comfort levels with silence across generations. For people who find silence unfamiliar or uncomfortable, Dr. Mandla recommends facing it as a challenge to train themselves to embrace silence gradually. He discusses the benefits of practicing silence, from achieving mental clarity to reducing stress and spurred creativity.

The conversation then shifts to how things can impact our inner peace, from constant external noise to the internal noise generated by psychological influences. Listeners will get a deeper understanding of how inner peace can help them maintain their emotional barriers against the distractions of the outer world. This episode also highlights various insights on seeking solace even amidst the urban chaos and noise pollution's detrimental effects on one's overall health.

Join us in this thoughtful exploration of peace, silence, and rest. It concludes with an enlightening excerpt from Dr. Mandla's book, "Conquer Your Mountains," a wellspring of inspiration that prompts introspection, self-realization, and resiliency. Tune in to listen, reflect, and be inspired.

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Transcript

Episode Transcript

Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:00):
How can you find mental rest in our busy world?
Welcome to the Conquer Your Mountains Week 12 podcast titled Finding Peace and
Silence in a Noisy World.
And in today's episode, we want to inspire you to seek moments of tranquility
and to find solace in the midst of chaos.
If you are following the Conquer Your Mountains reading plan,

(00:21):
you are in Week 12 that has the name One Chronicles, Give Me Ears to Hear.
My name is Amanda Witt and I'm a Senior Editor at LUCO, the faith and inspiration
imprint of Penguin Random House, South Africa.
We publish books that provide readers with engaging, high-quality reading material,
both fiction and non-fiction.
I'm excited to be chatting to Mandla in his podcast today, so let's kick it off.

(00:44):
Dr. Mandla, what does peace and silence mean to you personally?
For me, peace and silence mean a time of recovery.
We live in such a busy world and from the time that we were born there's noise
everywhere around us whether it's other people whether it's cars driving dogs barking trains,

(01:08):
planes and it's important to find moments where you can actually be peaceful
and silent and just so keen in terms of what is true and core to who you are.
And how can we intentionally create moments of silence amidst our busy lives?
I know for some of us that might seem like an impossible task.

(01:31):
Yeah, so I came across a post by Dr. Sandra Dalton-Smith.
And interestingly, she mentioned that there's actually seven types of rest that we need.
Often when people think of rest, they just think of sleep or lounging on the sofa.

(01:52):
I was surprised to hear that there's actually seven types of rest.
So there's physical rest, which is sleep.
That's what we are used to. And just lying down or having a massage,
that's all in that group of physical rest.
Then you have mental rest, and that's where you actually do something that stops

(02:14):
the busyness in your mind.
And for me the mental rest is the most difficult because as long as I'm awake,
my brain is firing there's all sorts of things happening
and bubbling under it's not that easy to activate mental rest and you might
find that even if you take a holiday if you haven't achieved the mental rest

(02:36):
you might as well have carried your business with you just to another venue
Then there's sensory rest,
and that's looking at all the things that stimulate our senses,
what stimulates your eyes, your smell, your ears.
There's social rest as well, and you get social rest by being with other people.

(03:00):
And it depends who you are with. If it's a positive relationship, it can be a place of rest.
Obviously, if it's not a positive relationship, then it's the opposite.
It's not rest, you're actually doing the opposite.
The fifth one is spiritual rest, and that talks to looking at who you are in

(03:20):
this world, what is your purpose,
what is the greatest thing that you belong to, what is your belief system and
what in that belief system promises to give you rest.
And many beliefs have got their own versions of the rest that they offer. suffer.
So that's important to look at.

(03:41):
The last two are emotional rest and creative rest.
The emotional rest is about being able to talk to someone about what you're going through.
Because when you share a dilemma or a challenge, in a way you are getting to
a resting place, you'll find that as soon as you've shared it,
there is that sense of relief and calming.

(04:07):
And And with creative rest, it could be, depends on your talents.
If you can paint, if you like to sing in the shower or whatever it is,
that act of creation actually gives you your rest.
So in summary.

(04:28):
Different types of silence creation or peace creation in our lives.
And we can't do without any one of them.
If you just have sleep, but your mind is not rested, you might as well not have slept.
So it sounds very much to me like rest and peace is definitely interconnected with each other.

(04:50):
That if you don't have peace while you're on holiday, for example,
you won't rest your mind because you won't have peace about things.
Yes, so true. That makes a lot of sense.
What role does technology play in disrupting our peace and quiet, if any?
I think technology is very noisy in our world, whether it's your watch,

(05:14):
your phone, even when you jump into your car.
Before, cars used to be just things that move.
Now, it's a piece of technology. You're using CarPlay. there's notifications
that are following you everywhere.
And we do need technology because it enables us to actually go about our daily

(05:35):
lives, to do business, to make money.
And there's good things we get from technology. We can access new knowledge.
We can access inspiration, like even with this podcast, it gets to someone through
the wonders of technology.
But the key thing with technology, though, is that it has a lot of notifications

(05:56):
and bright screens and digital noise that it comes with.
So we need to be careful that it's not the source of our lack of peace and quiet,
because tech can be noisy.
Easy and if you don't have a routine for switching it off when you don't need

(06:17):
it you'll just be surrounded by noise imagine you're trying to sleep and a 2
a.m notification notification comes and then you get up try and sleep again
in another notification you might think you're being responsive.
By not calming yourself, you're actually draining your ability to be at your

(06:39):
full potential the next day.
So would you say it's a good idea to maybe mute the phone and mute all notifications
for a certain period of time and say, okay, these are the times I use technology
and these are the times that I'm not going to?
Yes, yes, certainly. Very few people, if any, have the ability to sustain then

(07:00):
the level of technology noise that we go through,
and if you're not muting it at certain intervals, then that technology will
eventually shut you down. Absolutely.
It's a good way of looking at it, and a scary way. Is there a connection between

(07:21):
inner peace and external noise levels?
Do you think it influences how you feel in your inner world, your inner peace?
It depends how strong you are internally.
If you've got to the state where, based on your practices in terms of the different
forms of rest, you are able to separate the two,

(07:44):
you can be in a really noisy world, but still be at peace internally.
So if you picture people standing in a train,
some people could be just taking in all the sensory overload and people walking

(08:04):
past and you're just trying to absorb everything and it's feeling busy and the
train is noisy and there's cars hooting and babies crying.
And if you don't have that inner strength, all that will flow into you.
But if you have that strong barrier that says,
this is my inner world and this is how I protect it, you can be in that same

(08:28):
busy train wagon and that outer noise won't affect you internally.
So, it does take a level of practice to be able to get your mental and emotional
well-being to that stage where the external world doesn't beat you down.
Absolutely. So, even though we might not have control over the external noise

(08:51):
of the world, we can have control over our internal noise. I like that idea.
How do different cultures and traditions view silence? Yeah,
I've been exposed to two main cultures.
I think that one culture is the culture that I grew up in.
Traditional African culture in a fairly quiet city.

(09:13):
And if I look back there, there was a lot of silence.
So even if you were having a discussion or a meeting, you're not rushing in
and you're not fast paced, everything is paced, there's a lot of silence in
between people talking.
And then if you look at the more westernized culture, I think you find that there's less silence.

(09:35):
There's more, there's more of a pause. Things are happening quickly.
Quickly, and it also comes with the rate at which the world is expanding.
You can feel like you're in a rat race where things that should be done and
have to be done very, very quickly.
And reflecting on that, I do think that silence does differ between cultures.

(09:57):
There's also some cultures and traditions that promote practices such as contemplative
prayer, some of meditation. meditation, so there's different practices which
cultures use for creating silence and rest.
Would you say there's a difference in how people embrace silence or the idea

(10:19):
of silence depending on age?
I mean, the way the boomers or the Gen Zs and the Gen Xs and the millennials,
are they all approaching it differently?
I think the younger generation, I think they've grown up in technology enabled
world, world, which is full of business and notifications.
So they've grown up in a world where what we think is a noisy world,

(10:44):
to them, it's probably more natural.
That's interesting. Yeah. Don't know if there's a right or wrong.
I didn't grow up in that tech enabled world.
So I guess many in our generation are still adjusting to what happened. end.
So embracing silence might be a bit more of a challenge for them.

(11:05):
So for people who do find silence uncomfortable, how can they embrace it and
become comfortable with it?
Silence, and if I think of the piece that comes with it, it's not an easy thing to do.
And when I say it's not easy, if you're not used to being in silent moments,
try walking to a park and sitting on a bench with no stimulus or anything.

(11:33):
And you'll find that many of us will become uncomfortable and like,
maybe I should look at my phone. Maybe I should...
Get something to read, maybe I should talk to someone. So we are so used to not being silent.
And I think it comes with practice. And the purpose of silence and rest is not
for the sake of just being silent and restful.

(11:56):
The main purpose is to be able to calm yourself, to draw energy,
but not energy externally, but to draw energy from your core being.
That's, I think, an interesting idea for many who's not used to silence.
It is. So what would be the benefits that we can derive from spending more time

(12:18):
in silence, would you say?
For me, it's about mental clarity. I do find that if there's something that
I've been ruminating of, a thought that just keeps circling round and round.
Just pausing to stop and process can really help in terms of being clearer about what I want to do.
It's about reducing your stress and also

(12:40):
it's about being creative once you've allowed yourself to
get a place of you find that the time
that you thought you lost in slowing down is actually not lost because when
you come out of that you're a lot more creative and your brain is firing and
right it's thinking of new ideas it's not reacting based on a stress reflex

(13:01):
but it's reacting based based on what is actually possible.
That's actually an interesting concept because the silence then gives the brain
a chance to actually think and not having to process all the outside stimulus. That makes sense.
How can we find silence in urban environments or noisy workplaces though?

(13:22):
Because that's where most of us find ourselves in.
A lot depends on your surroundings. Yeah, I'm based in Cape Town And I think
Cape Town, we are blessed with many places in nature.
There's the beach, there's a mountain, there's forests.
I don't know how it is on your side in Kauteng.
Kauteng does have a few places that you can go to, also parks,

(13:46):
hiking trails, those kind of things.
But it's definitely something that you have to actively search out if that is
your intention, I would say.
Yes, or move to Cape Town.
What impact does noise pollution have on our overall health?

(14:07):
There is a physical impact of noise.
And yeah, I'm thinking superficially your ear and just all that continuous stimulus.
But the greater impact is psychological.
If I look at noise pollution in a broader perspective, noise pollution can be
voices that you shouldn't be allowing to be dominant in your life.

(14:31):
That can be noise pollution if you're hearing voices that are not telling you
things that will build you up and i'm not referring to imaginary voices in your
head if it's imaginary voices i think you've got a bigger problem please go see somebody.
Immediately but really noise pollution in terms of the things that you're allowed

(14:54):
to you speak into your life.
It could be people, it could be things on social media, and often social media,
once the algorithm decides that something is what you must hear,
it will feed you that noise and that can actually change your outlook on life,

(15:14):
either negatively or positively.
Yeah, what goes hand in hand with that whole notion of that your diet is not
just what you eat, it's what you hear, it's what you look at,
it's what you listen to. Yeah, that's very important.
Have you ever experienced a profound moment of silence and what did that reveal to you?
Not, I can't think of one major moment, but when I was working on the book,

(15:40):
Conquer Your Mountains, and it's a journal with lots of reflection,
there were many times when I actually forced myself to be silent and just receive
and get a sense of what, in my case, what I felt God was trying to tell me.

(16:00):
And I think what it revealed to me is what you see in the Conquer Your Mountains
book, all 250 pages out of it.
And what I really loved about the book when I read it was that it gives you
so many prompts prompts and opportunities for introspection and going silence

(16:21):
and really finding the answers within and not just reaching outward,
but really reaching inward for that silence,
those answers that it provides and to conquer your mountains. Yes, indeed.
We will end the podcast with an extract from Mandla's book, Conquer Your Mountains, week 12.
So page 50 reads, From the very moment of our birth, we prove we are alive by

(16:46):
the first noisy cry that we bowl out and it doesn't get much quieter from then on in all that cacao.
Music.
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