From Stillness Truth Begins To Speak

This is a personal growth journey. A real, lived experience.

Last year, in 2024, I made a bold decision. I paused my freelance HR work and said no to new assignments. Not because I had another plan, but because I felt something stirring beneath the surface. I needed to slow down, to take a breath. I wanted to stop doing and allow myself to simply be.

We, humans, are masters of keeping ourselves busy. We fill our days with lists, goals, and productivity. Animals don’t do that. They eat, rest, play, sleep—they’re not concerned with what time it is. But in our society, we’re conditioned to have clear roles and measurable success. We chase performance, climb ladders, and strive to prove our worth. So when someone takes a step back, even briefly, it raises eyebrows.

I've worked in HR and leadership development for years and built a solid reputation. And I combined this with coaching, mostly career-oriented. From the outside, life was good: three wonderful kids, a supportive partner of 23 years, and a shared passion for travel. I had the flexibility to choose projects, and the freedom to structure my time. I was happy and grateful. But something inside still felt... constrained. I wasn’t showing up fully. I was fitting in. I wasn’t expressing the deeper layers of who I am.

When we take the pressure off ourselves to be productive, we drop from our head into our heart and our being. That’s where stillness lives. That’s where truth begins to speak. 

Listening in stillness, where truth begins to whisper.

As a coach and longtime spiritual student, I know lasting fulfillment lives within. But to find it, we must listen to our heart and become aware of the other voices  - the ones we've internalized from childhood onwards: the inner critic, the wounded inner child, the well-meaning opinions of others, and the ego that tries to keep us safe by staying in the known.

These voices shape what we think we "should" be doing. We are masters of talking ourselves out of something that scares us.

And most of us are unaware of how deeply these stories run. But when you find yourself at a crossroads—a job that doesn’t align, a relationship that feels off—and you have the courage to pause, that’s when you hear your being speak. The body knows. It holds the truth before the mind can process. Just like the heart feels and intuits before we rationalize.

We often brush this off. Our minds take over, weighing pros and cons, making lists. But when we’re grounded, the heart’s voice grows louder. And when we’re really grounded, emotional blockages begin to release. The Sanskrit word for these is "sankaras" – pent-up emotions stored in the body. As they dissolve, we come home to ourselves.

This is where the real shift begins.

The first important lesson I want to pass on to my children is this: we create our reality based on the beliefs of our environment. Just like I was an atheist because I grew up in a secular, science-driven culture—I could have just as easily been Muslim or Hindu if raised elsewhere. Question the "truths" you've inherited. They're not always yours.

As a very wise teacher once told me: “All of us, regardless of age, are being taught to believe a certain reality. And we can decide what to accept and what to reject. When one understands that they create their reality, but that reality invariably starts with the social and cultural beliefs of the lowest common denominator, it makes clear that our beliefs must undergo restructuring. In other words, as we believe something, that belief begins to find expression in our reality, and that leads us to believe it at a more "factual" level. The belief becomes a fact, and then the fact becomes reality, and we can become a prisoner in that reality. And by "prisoner" I simply mean disempowered. We are never prisoners. The universe does not imprison us, but our beliefs can disempower us.”

Sit with this. Let it land.

From my heart to yours,

Cho

Part two follows soon...