Silence

I will be leaving in 3 days for an 8-day silent retreat. This entails being in complete silence away from technology and not speaking to a soul. I went through all sorts of emotions over the past 2 weeks from excitement, to curiosity, anticipation, fear, anxiety and apprehension. A part of me wants to stay home with my family in my comfort zone and another part of me is eager to explore the next horizon that will expand my soul journey, eager to dive deeper into myself and maybe find out more about the hidden parts of me.

So I thought what better way to start my retreat than to explore silence in my newsletter this week! I started looking for poems in my library and found two pieces of prose written by two of my favorite poets/philosophers David Whyte and Kahlil Gibran.

In his book "Consolations: The Solace, Nourishment and Underlying Meaning of Everyday Words" David Whyte writes "Silence is frightening, an intimation of the end, the graveyard of fixed identities. Real silence puts any present understanding to shame; orphans us from certainty; leads us beyond the well-known and accepted reality and confronts us with the unknown and previously unacceptable conversation about to break in upon our lives."

[...] "In silence, essence speaks to us of essence itself and asks for a kind of unilateral disarmament, our own essential nature slowly emerging as the defended periphery atomizes and falls apart. As the busy edge dissolves we begin to join the conversation through the portal of a present unknowing, robust vulnerability, revealing in the way we listen, a different ear, a more perceptive eye, an imagination refusing to come too early to a conclusion, and belonging to a different person than the one who first entered the quiet."

When the Prophet in Gibran's book "The Prophet" was asked to address the matter of talking he said:

"You talk when you cease to be at peace with your thoughts;

And when you can no longer dwell in the solitude of your heart you live in your lips, and sound is a diversion and a pastime.

And in much of your talking, thinking is half murdered."

He later added

"There are those among you who seek the talkative through fear of being alone.

The silence of aloneness reveals to their eyes their naked selves and they would escape."

What's interesting to me is that I am not afraid to be alone. On the contrary, I have, over the years, found peace, joy and solace in the time I spend in my own company. It is extended periods of silence that rock the boat peacefully moored in the depth of my being.

Another one of my favorite spiritual writers and poets, Mark Nepo, wrote about Entering Silence in his book "Seven Thousand Ways to Listen".

"Mostly we are caught in a storm of activity. For we live in the world, and are always drawn above and below and in between. Yet when we can stop talking, when we can stop mapping the chatter in our minds, when we can descend into that wordless current of being, we start to see Oneness. Helpful as this is, it is not enough. When we can summon the courage not to run back to the surface prematurely, we begin to sense and feel Oneness. When we can spend enough time below the noise of the world, even though we have to return, we might even say that, from time to time, we live in the unspoken. Then we might be blessed to experience Oneness.

To enter the unspeakable requires a quiet courage that points to what is often out of reach, though it is never far from us. Not unspeakable because it is awful, but because it lives beneath words. Not touching that silence and what lives there isolates us from the web of Spirit that connects everything. Then we lapse into what feels like a broken world of nothing. But entering that silence, the unspeakable shows itself as the thread of light that holds the web of life together. Feeling these threads, I am reanimated in a world where each small part contains everything."

Silence is familiar to me. I enter a space of silence every morning as I meditate. Sometimes I can stay in it for 10 minutes only if the chatter in my mind is overwhelming me and I feel anxious about something, at other times I am very comfortable staying in it for an hour or more. But being in silence for a whole week is something I haven't experienced yet.

In an interview with Sam Harris (founder of Waking Up), David Whyte said that "The object in meditation and all of our contemplative disciplines is silence. But… that silence is in order for you to perceive something other than yourself — what you’ve arranged as yourself to actually perceive this frontier between what you call your self and what you call other than your self, whether that’s a person or a landscape."

As I enter the silent space, I am sure there will be discomfort and I may feel at some point that I just want to get out of there and run as fast and as far as I can; but I would be running away from myself. I sense that for me to get to taste peace in the depth of silence I will have to fight a few demons of my own that have been standing there for a long time as gatekeepers... probably out of necessity, to protect me and allow me to function in a world that is loud and can't stop talking. To face my demons, my shadow, and my inner most fears, I need to tap into my courage and find that space in me that always shows up no matter the pain and the difficulty; the warrior part of me that I learnt to count on time and time again, that has seen me through the toughest times.

And then in silence, I will finally be able to give that warrior part of me permission to relax, stand down and just be, because there will be no need to protect me anymore. As the walls between my self and others become blurry, I may finally be able to experience the bliss of serenity and the gift of Oneness.