10 lessons from 10 days in silence

I am not a big fan of New Year’s Eve celebrations. Somehow they remind me, much more than birthdays do, of the passage of time. Life is short and NYE smashes that truism in my face. My usual strategy to overcome this feeling is to book a trip at year end, but I must admit that the sun, sea and palm trees never really managed to distract me from this sad feeling.?

So this year I tried something else: instead of escaping the discomfort, I wanted to take a closer look at it and “look the dragon straight in the eye” as they would say in some spiritual slang. I went way out of my comfort zone and booked a ten (!) day silent retreat at Hridaya Yoga in France. For ten days we were kindly asked not to speak, read or have any kind of (non)verbal communication with the other participants. The idea was to move the focus from the external world to the internal world through meditation, yoga, and silence.?

The daily program looked like this:

I can say a lot about this retreat but I will stick to the main takeaways.

1. Judging is ok. But be willing to adjust your judgments if needed.?

n the morning of day one, I frowned at the sight of my peers doing all kinds of yoga poses before entering into meditation. Some of them were even standing on their heads! I labeled it as “attention seeking behavior”. On day three, my body started aching a lot and I finally understood that it was a very good idea to warm up the body before sitting still for a long time. So I happily joined the downward dogs, triangle poses and bridges.

2. It’s about time to tame our monkey mind.

Before entering the retreat, I thought I had a rather calm mind. I was not a worrier. So why would I need meditation? Until we did an attention exercise where we were asked to count to seven, fourteen, twenty-one, etc.. Once distracted, we had to start again from the beginning. I must say, I barely got further than fourteen, because my mind was bored and got distracted so easily. I had to admit that my attention span was very small and my mind was like an untamed monkey. Meditation is a very important practice to train our attention, hence our mind, to be more focused on what matters.?

3. Writing things down brings peace of mind.

Building on the previous point, my restlessness kept building up throughout the retreat. I started thinking about all the things I had to do when I got back from the retreat, made scenarios about the outcome of certain events or got distracted by the smallest noize in the meditation room. On day seven, I was on the verge of getting crazy, so I decided to write down everything that kept my mind busy. I made a seven page long to-do list and journaled about my feelings towards certain events. And guess what, it helped a lot. The feeling of peace that appeared right after this writing session was liberating. It helped me to enjoy the last three days much more. So lesson learnt: “downloading” thoughts and feelings on paper is a life saviour when restlessness prevails.

4. Escapism will never lead to satisfaction.

We are often confronted with restlessness or a feeling of overwhelm. It may have different causes: a lot of work, bad relationships or a deep feeling of dissatisfaction and lack of purpose. Our first reaction is often to escape from this feeling by doing things in the outside world. Go on nice trip (with our bad relationship), work even harder (so you don’t have to think about whether or not this is the right job for you) or, even worse, make babies (maybe they will give you a sense of purpose). None of these will bring satisfaction. Restlessness invites us to look into it or, as I said earlier, to look the dragon straight into the eye. The following point explains how.?

5. Silence is the answer to everything.?

When we have problems, we often try to find solutions in the outside world. This may work in case you try to find the shortcut to delete files on your Mac, but my experience is that for the big questions in life, the answer is never in the outside world. The answer is within us (which is the good news), but it takes a good ear (i.e. silence) to hear the answer. This is often challenging as our daily lives are usually rather noisy (the bad news). So in case of big questions, take the deliberate choice to seek silence. In silence we come back to the essence of the problem and we find answers in our own essence by listening carefully.?

6. Identification leads to suffering. Letting go leads to happiness.

“Who am I?” was one of the central questions during the retreat. The idea behind this question was to get closer to our essence, to who we really are. In the first instance, our mind starts to formulate obvious answers to this question: “I am Carlien. I am 35 years old. I am a coach. I live in Antwerp. I like horses.” However the answers to this question reveal that there are quite a number of things with which we identify ourselves. If my name were different, would I stop existing? If I grew older, wouldn’t I be there any longer? If I lost my job, wouldn’t I be of any significance any longer? Slowly it brought me to the conclusion that letting go of any identification with age, social status, material possessions is the path to freedom. If I got to understand that my age, my possessions, my job would not define me any longer it would probably be much easier to feel happy.

7. We are love. All the rest in BS.?

During the retreat the teacher spoke a lot about love in the context that “we are love”. She explained that our true nature is love, light, happiness, peace or any other quality that smells like roses. I tend to adhere to this view on things. When we are born, we all are happy kiddos. We just cry when we need food, sleep, and comfort. When we grow up all kinds of programs are installed on us by parents, friends or schools. Slowly but surely our nature of love gets covered by dust, which makes it more difficult to shine. So never have anyone tell you that it’s normal to be unhappy. It’s not our nature. So go and take that duster to wipe off the dust and be happy again.

8. Spirituality is real.

I used to be a very rational skeptic about anything which could not be proven scientifically. However I have drastically changed my mind about this. I started relying more on my own experience about what is real. The reason is that science is only as smart as its practitioners (i.e. scientists) are. Until today we cannot explain how the first heartbeat of a fetus is triggered. Yet it does. We cannot explain how intuition can often be accurate in forecasting the outcome of events. Yet it does. Same holds true for spirituality. We cannot prove (yet) that there is more than just this life, that we are love (see point seven) or that we can communicate through energy. Yet we must admit that many people in different eras, cultures, religions or geographical locations have experienced similar experiences, have asked similar questions about life. There is a universal reality which cannot be explained, but which can be experienced.?

9. Death is like a spiritual booster.

On day ten we had a lecture about death. It has always been a topic that intrigued me, up to a point that I had almost started as a funeral agent after my career in business. I love death because it connects us to the essence of life. When death would not exist life would lose a lot of its value. When we die, we let go of all identification with the material world and we get back to our essence: love and light. I have also been fascinated by the whole research on near-death experiences. People from different cultures, different religious backgrounds (also atheists) seem to have had similar experiences after nearly dying: an intense feeling of unconditional love and acceptance, a tunnel experience moving up to a powerful light, a flashback on one’s life, to name just a few. Many people start their spiritual journey after such an experience.?

10. Integrate your daily life into your spiritual life.

Before letting us go after ten days of silence, our teacher gave us some tips and tricks “to integrate our daily life into our spiritual life”. I thought she made a mistake and wrote “to integrate our spiritual life into our daily life”. But she stressed that this was how she meant it: our spiritual life should be the focus of our energy and maybe we can try to integrate a job or a family life in it. The priority should be to get closer to our essence and true nature: love and light, mostly through meditation. All the rest is distraction. I must say, I haven't managed to put my head around this one yet, but I am intrigued by it and will explore it further ;).

A lot of food for thought and for potential discussions. So if you are triggered or want to know more, just send me a message at [email protected]