Sign Language

Spark | by Suhailah is A Monthly Personal Growth & Transformation Newsletter providing you with tools and personal stories & insights to help you feel better—and to feel, better. Let’s embark on this journey of self-discovery and awakening together, embracing emotional and mental freedom.

“The only way to make sense out of change is to plunge into it, move with it, and join the dance.” ~ Alan Watts

“Nothing is for nothing. There is nothing, absolutely nothing, that we go through that cannot be reframed as for our good or someone else’s good in the long run of it.” ~ Suhailah Yoba

I listen without fear.
I respond in truth.
I trust what returns to me.

I was recently at a doctor’s appointment. It was an audio exam after I had a recurring ear infection and I wanted to understand and get to the bottom of why this kept happening…and out of nowhere.

On all fronts I was assured that this is the kind of ear infection that is most common in children, in kids. I’m not a kid, so this baffled me further. And I hadn’t been swimming, even though all of the professionals who checked inside my ear could see water backed up inside of it.

As part of my inquiries and conversations with my primary care doctor, I asked to be sent to an Ear, Nose, & Throat specialist. As part of seeing that specialist, I was sent to another audio specialist to get an audio exam because even though this ear pain and irritation passed some days after its initial onset each time, what alerted me that something was going on, going wrong, to begin with was an immediate feeling that I had a loss of hearing on one side whenever it occurred. Always, on the same side.

I mean technically, I could still hear, but it felt like my whole head was stuffed on one side, kind of like when you’re on a plane and your ear and head get full and you go to pop your ears by opening and closing your mouth, except it doesn’t pop and your ears and head stay clogged. It felt like this…x 10.

So I’m at the audio specialist. There, you go into a booth that is not unlike a recording booth in many ways, where a singer would go to record a new song.

The walls are padded with different black cushions with different shapes, it has a chair for you to sit in, equipment and mics so you can hear whats being said on the other side, and it has a door that closes.

“Are you claustrophobic?” the audio specialist asked inquisitively. Compassionately.

“Yes,” I say easily.

I go on to explain that I wasn’t always and it’s not with everything, but it seemed to have started during the pandemic and now I can’t even stand to be in an elevator by myself, especially if it’s small with no mirrors.

I go on to tell her that this is strange because I’m a New Yorker. I grew up in elevators as part of my everyday life. We always lived on high-ish floors and in my career I’ve also worked on high floors in very tall buildings, so I’m not sure why this became a thing for me.

Me and this doctor, the audio specialist, chit chat some more and she tells me some of the strange quirks that she also picked up since and after the pandemic. She shared with me a remembrance from right when the world started to open up again, her going to sign a physical check to pay a bill for a meal at a restaurant, being handed the bill from the waiter - after us all being no contact for so long - and her not remembering how to sign the check.

I understood. And we both laughed and shook our heads at the strangeness of the times we lived in during and post-pandemic, and in these very unusual and unexpected personal ways.

In any event, now I’m sitting in the booth for my audio exam. Because I said I’m claustrophobic and the booth is small, she said, “Okay, so we’ll keep the door open then,” assuring me that it won’t affect the test.

Okay, cool. I get in.

The booth I’m sitting in can only fit one person. The seat in the booth is face forward, looking through a square-ish, rectangle-ish glass right in front of me that is shaped and positioned like a window to look out at the person, the doctor, conducting the test seated at her own table and station outside of it. Me positioned like I am the conductor of a train seated in mine. - Same idea.

No passenger seat next to me, just the wall to my right and the door that would normally be closed wide open to my left. Except, unlike a train, this audio booth is meant to be stationary and is. And so there is no steering wheel, just a seat for me to sit and a window for me to look through to see the doctor’s cues. It’s kind of like sitting in a video game to play Pac-Man at the arcade like I used to do back in the day.

So before we begin, the nice doctor lady, who I actually thought was quite curt and a little mean when I’d first encountered her in the lobby checking in for my appointment, now comes around to the open booth door to give me instructions. Warmly, she’s now standing at the open door of this cockpit of mine and she’s explaining what’s about to happen.

She tells me the kind of tests she is going to be conducting. She tells me how many. She tells me why.

She tells me that there is a mic and audio system, a feedback loop, where we are connected both ways and where I will be able to hear her, the prompts, sentences, words, frequencies, and sounds throughout, but there are some parts of the test where she won’t be able to hear me back. And so she explains that for those tests and parts of the exam, I am to signal to her when or if I hear what is being played for me to hear. Because there are also different devices that are either put in or over my ears or on my head (not on my actual ears) depending on the test. Okay, I got it.

She continues to explain that there are about five or six audio tests that she will conduct, and each one serves a different reason, a different purpose. For instance, one for volume — how soon I can hear the sound being transmitted to me. One for clarity — if I can hear what is being said exactly as it is being said, etc.

This last one is like call and response, and in general, I’m a kid at heart. Many people tell me I have a youthful, sometimes child-like, spirit, so it all felt like a game to me. This was cool. Fun, even.

Then, before we began, she explained more to me. She was patient and kind, and by how comfortably close she stood…next to me, because I was already sitting in my seat facing ahead, my head turned to her to listen and look in her eyes as I did…I could tell she must deal with a lot of people who are truly afraid of losing their hearing or failing this test. She held some instrument in her hands, gently rolling it over between her fingers and hands like a toy as she spoke to me. And she spoke to me like I was a small child.

She began by saying…You know, children, very young children, they are not afraid to try things or do things, or new things, because they have no concept of right or wrong, of doing something right or wrong. Of being right or wrong. Of failure. So they can just go with it and have fun. It’s only us adults who are afraid of being wrong or doing something wrong and of failing. And this is because we have the experience of what it feels like to fail, and so we have a hard time being wrong. We don’t like or want to ever be wrong. Or to fail. We always want to be right.

She continued. In the tests you’re about to take there are no right or wrong answers. That is not the point of it. Please, be easy and remove this from your mind.

She explained that she finds that when adults do these kinds of hearing tests, they are so busy trying to get it right that they begin to overthink and question what they heard, therefore sometimes not responding at all or too late because they are busy thinking as opposed to just responding naturally.

She told me not to do that. To please not do that. Like an exceptional teacher who had been doing this for many, many years, she reassured me that even if I am not sure of what I hear or if I heard anything at all, to not second guess myself and to just provide or confirm to her - through the glass between us, where she could see me, where I could see her, where I could also hear, but at some points where we could not hear each other because of the sounds or devices being used - a visual cue that I needed to do with my hands. And she told me what this visual cue was.

I am someone who likes to learn, and I also like instructions, so for me, I loved her approach so much. (I even told her so after the exam, when I thanked her as I was leaving, for making the tests easy to understand and comfortable. I told her she is a great teacher!) It took so much pressure off of me. It made me relax inside of that booth and inside of myself. I felt my body release tension and all thought, knowing I did not have to try so hard. I did not have to do anything, really. All I had to do was listen and respond in truth to what I heard.

To take a moment to let the sound seep in and make its way into the part of my ears and inner world that registered it as sound or a word. To understand what I heard within me and respond back to it and her…

“I heard you.”

I did not literally have to say those words, but by using whichever special cue or word I was prompted to say back, given this is how the tests went.

The theme of Spark | by Suhailah, this newsletter, all year has been Rebuilding. Each month’s theme adds to and builds on the one that came before. The topic of this December issue is Reflection & Integration, and this is the last of that overarching theme for the year as we close out the calendar year of 2025 in just a few short weeks.

The word integration comes from the Latin integratio, meaning “renewal,” “restoration,” which in turn comes from integrare, “to make whole.” It later entered English (via French intégration) with the sense of bringing separate parts together into a unified whole.

In that spirit, this month is about gathering what this year has given us…lessons, losses, growth, and grace…as we continue the work of rebuilding and allowing it all to belong inside a more honest, integrated self.

The way I experience integrating in my own life and in almost everything I do is to sit with it until all of the pieces start to come together and form what at least to my inner sense feels complete. Not necessarily complete for all time or finished, especially if there is still work or something to be done about something I am working on or building, even if it’s a relationship, but it’s a feeling like I can rest here for a while. It’s complete for now. Or at least this stage is. It feels whole in a way. Full circle. Like I can rest now. It’s a place that says: for now, this is whole enough. and so it allows my nervous system and my heart to rest.

The word reflection comes from Latin: re, meaning “back, again,” and flectere, meaning “to bend,” “to turn.” So reflectere literally means “to bend back” or “to turn back.” From there, the meanings unfolded: physical, as in light bending back or a mirror image; mental, as in thought turning back on itself in contemplation and consideration; and relational, as in something that shows back what is present…a representation, an echo.

I find that the end of any given year is always a good and natural time for reflection and integration. And both feel quite necessary right about now, after a year like this one, where you can’t tell what was yours versus someone else’s. There was so much upon us from the outside world.

It is clear to me, like me sitting in that sound booth to do my audio exam, that we cannot be so concerned with getting it right that we do nothing at all. That we don’t turn life into a booby trap kind of waiting game, too afraid that we might get it all wrong. Sometimes so afraid of the thought that we might be wrong that we freeze or turn back to a miserable or less than desirable place we came from. Or a pattern. Stuck. Until another year, and then another year rolls by, marked by birthdays, summers, and holidays, until we feel another year has passed and we haven’t seen much progress or movement toward what we wanted or what we thought was possible. This is a horrible way to live.

This is no way to live at all, and newsflash: none of us are getting out of here alive. And I will say this a million times and a million times again: all paths lead home, and nothing is for nothing. There is nothing, absolutely nothing, that we go through that cannot be reframed as for our good or someone else’s good in the long run of it. Something can be learned from most anything. Or maybe this is just the thing I need to tell myself so that I can survive. I don’t know. But it seems to work wonders for me way beyond simply surviving.

In my audio test, audio can be considered a form of reflection as well, both literally and metaphorically.

In the literal sense, sound reflects. Meaning, sound waves hit a surface and bounce back. This is called an echo (as I also stated earlier related to reflection) or reverberation as we know. And in this, the Latin root still holds. The wave bends back toward the listener, who was me in the sound booth taking my audio exam, in this example I’ve been working with.

In one of my audio tests, the ear itself responded back to sound. Meaning, a sound was played into my ear, my inner ear emitted a response sound back out, and that response was measured.

This is literal reflection in function, even if technically described as emission or response. So this system within me, within us all, is not a passive one. It returns what it receives, transformed.

Keyword: Transformed.

Metaphorically, when we hear and interpret, we are absolutely in reflective territory. The sound enters. The meaning turns back inward. The understanding forms by returning the sound to itself.

This is why when we say phrases like, “Let me reflect on what you just said,” or, “That really resonated with me,” (which is direct feedback I am happy to say I get a lot of on this newsletter as well as my podcast), it feels precise, not like someone just trying to sound poetic.

Conceptually, reflection is not bound to sight. It is a pattern of return.

So when the Earth completes this latest one year run around our sun — close enough for us to see its light and feel its warmth, but not so close as to get burned — and before, in the northern hemisphere where I sit and write this, before it begins its northward journey again leading to spring and so on, let us remember that not only during this time can we honor reflection and integration.

At any time we can tap into this pattern of reflection by staying silent enough that when we sit in the quiet of our homes, our rooms, our bathrooms, our offices, our cubicles and desks…ourselves, even if for a moment, we can sit long enough, and clear enough. Just as I did as I sat in the sound booth doing my audio exam, and could only say “I heard you” back to the sound being transmitted and the woman on the other side of the booth listening and looking for my cue. My response.

Let us all be able to say “I heard you,” and THANK YOU, in gratitude to whatever might come our way, knowing that the finger of God never points where the hand of God isn’t somehow making a way.

Have an incredible rest of December and a wonderful holiday season wherever, whatever, and however you might celebrate, or even if you don’t at all.

May the spirit of God be with you, bringing peace and blessings in the days ahead. See you in the new year!

Suhailah ❤️ 💫✨

Once a day for the rest of the year:

• Sit in silence for three minutes. (5-10, if you can)

• Ask inwardly: What wants to be heard right now?

• Do not interpret. Do not fix.

• Simply notice what arises.

• End by saying quietly, I heard you.

No journaling or action required.
Just your honest response.

• Where in my life am I trying to get it right instead of listening?

• What am I afraid I might hear if I stop overthinking?

• Where have I confused silence with failure?

• What part of me already knows the answer but is waiting for permission?

• What does wholeness feel like right now, not forever?

• Where am I responding late because I am second guessing?

• What would it mean to answer life with truth instead of certainty?

• What am I still carrying because I never paused long enough to integrate it?

• Where have I mistaken reflection for judgment?

• What is asking to be heard again?

• What “sound” keeps returning in my life?

• Where am I allowed to rest without resolving?

• What would change if I trusted my first response?

My purpose here in this lifetime is to help others remember who they are, what they came to create, and then to provide examples and tools to help them do these things. Click HERE to see everything at once, click HERE to explore my company website and learn more about what I do, and feel free to share any or all with anyone who might find anything useful. Also, new episodes of Grow with Me by Suhailah (my podcast), are available on the platforms below and everywhere else you listen. Click ant of the links to listen:

We also received a little surprise from Spotify in their year end 2025 Wrapped report last week…as seen below. We have podcast listeners in close to 20 countries now so if you are one who has been listening, thank you for listening and sharing both my newsletter and my podcast! ❤️

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