What is your relationship with Silence?
For the last 3 Octobers I've gone on silent retreat with one of my spiritual communities. It's 5 days long. This is not Vipassana, which which is way more hard core in my mind. At the retreats I attend, there are several teaching portions each day where participants can speak, and it's only 5 days. But it is quite a bit of time in silence, especially for the modern (western) person, and for me.
The first year was transformational.
I was in a hectic season of grad school and partnership and the silence felt like a warm blanket, like resting at the bottom of the ocean (an image that for the most part terrifies me, but at this time was respite). We had gathered over Samhain and an otherworldly mist had descended into the little valley where we were retreating, making the Other World feel very imminent, as it always is. Leaving this space and returning to the rest of my life felt like a physical pain.
The second year I was simply bored.
Truly, I watched Schitt's Creek and sang musicals in my mind for 5 days. I was energetically and spiritually twiddling my thumbs. I could not accept or settle in the silence. There was little respite. Our multiple daily sits dragged ONNNN and on. I did not feel even remotely virtuous or spiritual. I felt like a teenager being dragged to church. I was so relieved to talk again.
This past year was a new kind of excruciating.
I had a rough patch this last fall/winter and it made being silent within myself nearly intolerable. Without my normal comforts/distractions of other people, work and TV, silence made me want to crawl out of my skin. I knew abstractly what was happening, what all the mystics say about times like this. But none of it was translating into my heart and body and experience. By the 3rd night I had resolved to leave the next morning. But I accidentally slept in and so in order to leave I would have had to pass the practice room where everyone had already gathered for the morning session.
Only my shame kept me from trying to sneak past them.
That afternoon I managed to connect with our teacher, and I really have to hand it to her. She didn't ask and wasn't interested in whatever story I was wrapped up in about my experience -- she just named some deeper threads from the tradition and returned me gently to the practice. After that it was like the fever 'broke' and I stayed the final 2 days, carried more by my lack of will power to resist and the current of the group practice.
This is just one series of encounters with silence that I've experienced, where my own attachment bonds and relational dynamics with silence and with the practices of encounter with it and my ways of being in that moment in time were shown back to me in beautiful painful clarity.
I think one of my grad school mentors said to us once that we tend to fill silence with all of our fears.
So after that winning pitch for silence, I know I'll have all of you banging down the door to come be silent with me
Why not??
Silence and Song, happening May 20th, is an invitation into silence that will be much shorter and (hopefully) much gentler than a multi-day silent retreat.
If you are craving silence, it will be a chance to notice that.
If you have no experience with silence, it will be a chance to notice that.
If you are avoiding silence at all cost, it will be a chance to notice that.
With love,
Kate