Lessons from Silence
What retreats teach us about life
I have recently returned from two weeks of attending - and then teaching - silent retreats at the Moulin de Chaves in France. I was a student for the first week, practising 8 hours of meditation a day supported by the graceful guidance of Martin Aylward and Peace Twesigye. In the second week I stepped into the role of guide and teacher as I welcomed 30 women and men into a week of silence, yoga, meditation and embodied dharma.
It was a profound and beautiful experience, which continues to touch us all.
Meanwhile, the Earth continues to warm and humans continue to war.
I was unplugged and in silence when conflict broke out in the Middle East. Emerging a day later with heightened levels of sensitivity and compassion, I was struck by the parallels of our inner and outer journeys. This human heart is profoundly tender. Yet its reactive expression can be devastatingly violent.
Through witnessing my own patterns and recognising them in others over many years, I have become familiar with this paradox. I see how violence is perpetuated when we hold blindly to limiting beliefs, how suppressing or embellishing what we are feeling becomes another form of violence, and how we tend to spiral through similar dynamics in different guises until we choose to meet things in a new way.
I have also come to see that healing and transformation really is possible. Looking back, there are so many holes I no longer fall into. There are fewer undigested feelings, mental constructs and habitual behaviours which hijack me. I’m less reactive, more open and at ease. But more importantly, I have witnessed how this very personal inner transformation impacts other people. I am able to be more present and love more deeply. Being less reactive means I’m less destructive. I am learning to listen, and increasingly trusting the ways I’m asked to show up in the world. And of course this isn’t just me: I witness these transformations in countless other courageous women and men I am blessed to walk alongside. We are waking up and growing up together, walking each other home.
And yet, still, the Earth continues to warm and humans continue to war.
I wish I had more answers to help the big questions burning so hot in the world right now. But my skill lies in caretaking the small moments of what it is to be human, and I’m feeling that these lessons from silence are increasingly relevant - perhaps even vital - to the collective journey. What we do to ourselves, we do to each other. And what we do to each other becomes the narrative of our collective.
Each one of us has an essential gift to offer back to this precious world as it spins and spirals through space on its own dance. I practise each day to learn the song of this human heart, so I can sing it back to us when we have forgotten. I offer these words in the same way we lit candles together at the end of the retreat: as reminders for us all of the lessons received from silence which teach us about life. Singing a new song, lighting a new flame, for the vision of living together in a new way.
Below, I share some of these lessons in more depth: the invitations to slow down, open to complexity, listen, feel… and repeat. Doing this matters because it changes the ways we show up in the world. It invites us to shift from unconscious reactivity to appropriate response. Imagine if each of us, everywhere, committed to living with this intention. How would the world look and feel? And how can we know the answer to this question without committing to living with it ourselves, first?
If you feel drawn to explore this with me in an embodied way, here (and below) are some upcoming events to help us all slow down, open up, listen, feel and respond from a new place: a mindful parenting q&a, a daylong silent meditation retreat, a yoga workshop, a week of daily meditations and a weeklong silent yoga, meditation and embodied dharma retreat.
Slow down
We move so fast. There are ever more studies confirming that the collective global attention span is shrinking, but most of us don’t need these studies to confirm what we can already feel. The addiction to stimulus, new information, soundbites; the impatience if something takes more than seconds to load or has too many words to consume it fast; the sense that I’m not really making space to engage with this (or you), but am looking for a hit whilst actually doing many other things all at once.
We are increasingly scattered, shattered and fragmented in our minds. This inevitably impacts how we feel in this body and heart, which inevitably impacts how we relate and act in this world.
When we slow down and simplify on a retreat, at first we witness this internal friction and static. But as we relax around it and choose not to feed its frenetic energy, something begins to soften and release. The energy inside our head relaxes and widens. We are more able to feel our body again. As the energy of the body stabilises and expands, we begin to feel a wider sense of who we really are. The heart has permission to relax its guard, so that feelings which haven’t had time to be felt can finally flow through our system to be liberated and released.
We discover what practitioners have known for centuries: that there is within us a foundation of compassion, wisdom and delight which rises up in appropriate response. When we slow down and listen with love, we are able to access this appropriate response. When instead we move too fast, so often we act from the violent reactivity of unconscious emotions, habitual behaviours and conditioned beliefs.
This really matters.
Let’s learn to slow down. Let’s remember to come into this body with curiosity and care, softening around what we find here and resting beside it patiently, with love. Let’s do this first, before we act. Because we see all around us what happens when we forget.
Open to complexity
On retreat, we are invited into a space of receptivity. We open all our sense-doors to receive the fullness of this moment without holding on, pushing away or distracting ourselves. Eyes receive sight, ears receive sound, nostrils receive scent, the tongue receives taste, the skin, muscles and organs receive sensations. The mind receives thought. The heart receives emotion.
The Buddha insightfully described the mind as a sixth sense. No longer elevated from other sense perceptions, we are reminded that thinking is simply another way we receive and perceive the world around us. I like to include the heart as a seventh sense. All seven senses receiving with tenderness, care and curiosity. Completely natural, intimate with life. None of this is a problem.
But of course we make it a problem in the ways in which we engage with these seven sense doors. We hold on to what we like, push away what we don’t, distract ourselves from anything neutral, and lose ourselves in the mind’s stories and Me, You, This and Them. So our practice is to open and receive life on the one hand, and to release our compulsions on the other hand. We receive and release: both hands open.
What happens when we practise in this way, is that we widen our capacity to rest in complexity. We receive what is true whilst releasing what we imagined or wanted to believe was true, which means we discover that there are many flavours present all at once and they are often contradictory. Life is complex.
At the end of the retreat, people spoke of grief and joy, agitation and gratitude, sunlight and soup, all in one moment.
Resting in complexity is sometimes called equanimity, but that’s a word which can be misinterpreted to imply a coolness and distance from life. Equanimity is more like the wide lap of mother Earth, which holds this too, and this too, with so much love.
Opening to complexity means loving what we find, first, before moving to figure out or fix anything. Just as an archetypal mother loves the distressed child - and listens with love - before moving in with fixing and fussing. Often the loving and listening is all that is needed for appropriate response to arise.
Let’s become ever more willing to embrace complexity. As if climbing the mountain to view the whole terrain - not needing an answer yet. Waiting to receive what we don’t yet understand, rather than battling with our neighbour over a shared patch of land.
Listen
Equanimity grows empathy. We learn to receive the fullness and complexity of this moment, with love. As we listen to ourselves and each other, to the land and the beings which swim, crawl, walk, run and fly upon it, we recognise the vulnerability of being alive. How all things long for safety, respect, belonging and love; how all things long for freedom and self determination.
The more we embrace our complex and often contradictory nature, the more we embrace this in others too. Each time we experience something in our own body, heart and mind, and meet it with loving presence rather than reacting to it like we once did, we are able to relate to all those who have had that experience in a new way as well. As we understand ourselves at deeper and more subtle levels, we understand each other too. The more we expose our own vulnerability to ourselves, the more we are able to forgive ourselves for the actions we regret. Can I be grateful for the journey which has taken me to this moment of choosing another way?
And the more we reveal our vulnerability and forgive ourselves, the more we recognise the vulnerability of others behind their violence or denial as well. The desire to make others suffer (as I or those I align with have suffered), begins to relax. This changes everything. Love can be fierce in its response, but it never carries vengeance.
Forgiveness can’t be forced however - this only leads to bypass (which is another form of violence). But, as the success of truth and reconciliation programmes have shown, forgiveness emerges naturally the more we listen and feel. Because empathy arises from the heart, not the head. It is one thing to understand a different perspective from ours, but if we remain at that level we can equally quickly explain it away with clever counter arguments. It’s another thing to feel another person from a place which recognises their inherent goodness. Knowing the goodness and vulnerability which lies within you, how is it to be you? Knowing the goodness and vulnerability which lies within me, how is it to be me? What is it that we need? Really, what is it that we need?
Feel
Equanimity grows empathy which leads to greater emotional maturity. This is profoundly important for us now, because we are emerging from generations who were close to emotionally illiterate. Many of us (or certainly our parents or grandparents) were taught from a young age that most emotions are unsafe to feel. Added to that are the repeated examples around us of emotions being violently and reactively expressed. We need to discover new ways to be with emotional currents as they ebb and flow.
Emotions, like young children, actually want to be recognised, allowed and loved, first. Anxiety longs to be given a safe ground to stabilise itself; anger longs to have its potent energy rising in the face of violation honoured and directed; grief longs for permission and safety; fear longs for connection and belonging. It is not our challenging emotions that are destructive, it is our distorted relationship towards them, whether the inner violence of suppression or the outer violence of reactive expression. And it’s not just challenging emotions which become distorted: many of us are unfamiliar with receiving the fullness of joy, love, delight and peace as well. What we do with one emotion, impacts them all.
On retreat we draw on many supports (including silence, meditation to quieten the mind, yoga to soften and stabilise the body and postures which stimulate certain emotions), in order to learn another way of being with emotional life. With the embrace of these supports, we learn to recognise emotions, validate them, feel them fully and respond with love.
When we are in a state of shock, however, we cannot feel. Our system goes into the adrenal response of fight, flight and freeze in order to prevent us from feeling. Feeling gets in the way of fighting, running away or hiding, which is why the shock response is helpful for survival. We may survive, but we cannot thrive. This state was always only ever intended to be temporary. So, in these moments, it is the responsibility of others around us to help us stabilise our nervous system: to remind us to pause, come into the body and feel again.
How would it be if we came together collectively as nations in this way? If, understanding that shock breeds violence, we took responsibility to caretake those nations in shock by holding a global space to slow down, to listen and to feel. Rather than taking sides, how would it be if everybody, together, held space to slow down, listen and feel, first, before we looked deeper still, willing to find a collective response which included our parts in the conflict too?
Repeat
Complexity, equanimity, empathy and feeling set the stage for something new to emerge. Because it’s new, we can’t know what it will look like until we’ve laid new foundations. Otherwise, we will simply keep building on the same distorted base. There needs to be a space of not-knowing which we return to, again and again. There’s no arrival, but rather an ongoing spiralling journey of listening, feeling and responding, which grows our capacity to give, receive and be the precious gifts that we are.
On retreat, we cultivate beginners mind: not knowing the answer so that we might continue to listen and receive something new. This applies to everyday life as well, not only in relation to our own lives, but also in regards to the ways we view each other and the world. Once we recognise and allow an ever wider and deeper experience of this moment, the parts which were racing forward with taking sides, having fixed opinions and winning the debate, all begin to relax. Listening becomes more important than being the one with the answer. Which returns us to complexity, and our own complicity in this moment’s unfolding, again and again.
The more I listen and receive, the more I find layers of violence everywhere, leading to the normative violence I am complicit in every day. The violence of capitalist growth in a finite world. The violence of privilege in a colonial/imperialist culture. The arrogance of having an opinion about how others should behave whilst defending the comfort of my own status quo. The transformations required are vast. This space in between is an uncomfortable place to be.
But I also know that I’m not alone. And the more I listen and receive, the more I have faith in our individual and collective journeys. I have witnessed the spiralling nature of the healing process countless times in myself and others. I know we need to revisit patterns again and again. Yet if we really pay attention, we may see that each time we revisit it, we are meeting it from a new perspective. The pattern continues until the readiness grows within us (both individually and collectively) for a true release. And each time there is a little more space, awareness and conversation around it. We are not looping in an endless circle, we are spiralling into something new.
The more I work with others and witness their wings spreading in widening ripples of wisdom, compassion and delight, the more I have faith in humanity to respond, each of us utterly uniquely, with appropriate response. When enough of us do that, something will emerge that we may not even be able to imagine from where we stand today. Together we are powerful, but only through the power of each individual body, heart and mind remembering who they are and why they are here.
UPCOMING EVENTS
November 18th: Online Mindful Parenting Q&A with Sangha Live Connect
November 25th: One Day Silent Meditation Retreat with London Insight Meditation
December 9th: Yoga Workshop with Love Supreme Projects
December 11th-15th: Online Daily Meditations with Sangha Live
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Beautiful ❤️. And so true. So much wisdom here.