A few years ago, I went on my first “silent retreat” over a three day weekend. The goal was to not speak, read, listen to radio or music nor watch TV. We were in retreat at Benet Hill Monastery near Colorado Springs, Colorado. Everything we needed was within walking distance and we were on a meal plan provided by the Sisters. This helped to keep the outside stimuli and the need to “think” to a minimum. The goal was to just BE.
Before I went, I was telling one of my long-time friends about it on a phone call. Before he could say anything, I said, “Are you laughing?” He said, “from deep in my belly!” Then, a person who I just met said, “but you are so outgoing and gregarious.” This just made me laugh. I know that I have neither the inclination nor is it my path to take a vow of silence at this particular time in this particular life. But, I would like to share with you what I experienced in my 60 hours of silence.
We used a guided meditation to set the tone for the 60 hours. This meditation, channeled and narrated by Marsha Hankins, helped us connect to the larger parts of ourselves, to mother earth and the cosmos. By leaving this meditation in silence and not breaking it with any other outside stimuli was quite powerful. I could focus on experiencing the feeling of being connected and being one with everything around me in the physical world. I could also experience being connected and being one with everything in the metaphysical world. Experiencing the metaphysical world through the sensations and the sense of knowingness that is lost in the overload of the 5 human senses. This was staggeringly profound, and I was only 1 hour into the silence.
I am not sure I ever mastered the “monkey mind” which is part of the goal of being in silence. The idea is to be in the silence long enough that you don’t feel the need to entertain yourself even in your own thoughts. Instead, you simply allow yourself to experience the “now”. I found myself still discussing scenarios with myself. Discussing conversations that I had in the past and why they were appropriate or how I could have handled them better. Or discussing different ways I could say things that I knew I was going to need to say when I was “back in the real world”. These discussions are all “judgment based.” I realized I was judging myself for things I did in the past or judging “what if I don’t get it correct” in the future. A whole lot of judging going on!
Finally, what I found the most surprising was the simple yet acute joy that I found when I was walking around the monastery grounds. It was a rainy weekend and it was cool at the altitude of 6000 feet. Never being cold but enjoying the coolness was a slice of heaven. Walking the Labyrinth at least twice a day and reminding myself of the innocence and breathtaking aspects of our shared reality that can include peace and relaxation if we allow it. I found myself trying to determine how I would be able to add in some of the aspects of the silence into my everyday life even as the 24-hour news cycle and access to the internet tempt me to fill every moment of every day with someone else’s thoughts and someone else’s experiences. I am setting my intention to claim a little bit of every day for the silence in nature, the silence in the cosmos and the silence within me. This will surely be how and when I find the God/Goddess Within.