We are embraced by silence and silence cares for us deeply. In the embrace of silence we sense the essence of living things radiating loudly — ROBERT RABBIN
To sit in silence with other people is one of the most intimate experiences imaginable.
Most of the time, we deprive ourselves of that intimacy. We avoid silence in social gatherings. It creates discomfort.
If there’s a gap in conversation, we try to fill it with small talk about sports. Work. Weather. Something. Anything.
The problem is, we dissipate a lot of energy in this way.
When I’m willing to endure shared silence for a few minutes, I discover that on the other side of discomfort is something oddly beautiful.
The people I am most intimate with are the people who are most willing to be silent with me.
One mark of people who have loved each other for decades is the capacity to sit with each other for hours — in silence.
Stop talking and thinking, and there is nothing you will not be able to know — SENG-TS’AN
When our children were young, we wanted to take them to church.
This was hard.
I’d been raised Lutheran. My pastor once told me that non-Lutherans are barred from heaven.
I had friends who weren’t Lutheran.
Faced with a choice between heaven and friends, I chose friends. And at age 18, I stopped going to church.
But with children of my own, things seemed different. I wanted them to grow up in a spiritual community. I wanted an open-minded group of people who were willing to create something profound in each other’s presence.
So we visited a lot of churches, looking for that.
We drank coffee with Unitarians.
We sang hymns with liberal Baptists.
We even went to some Lutheran churches to see if anything had changed.
We never found what we were looking for.
The Quakers came the closest. They were willing to sit in silence for a while. But then someone stood up to speak, and all the energy drained out of the room.
So we gave up on churches.
Instead, we chose to spend an hour every Sunday morning doing yoga and meditation at home with the kids.
This worked.
At first, I wanted to fill that hour with content. I prepared little homilies. I chose inspirational quotations.
Then I let all that go. We pulled out our yoga mats, stretched, and then meditated together for a few minutes.
During those weekly minutes of shared silence, I felt closer to my family than ever before.
Our kids are grown and have homes of their own. But am I confident that they will remember the silence.
The more we rest in this silence, the more we come to know it as our essential nature. It is this silent core of being that remains unmoving and unbroken throughout the glories and tragedies of “my life.” — AMODA MAA
Silence is my main spiritual practice.
Actually, I don’t have to “practice” it. I surrender to silence, and the silence “practices” me.
The silence gently sweeps me up and carries me.
There are two levels of silence. One is external stillness — reducing noise in our physical environment.
The other level of silence is internal stillness. I get there when I’m willing to sit through all the internal noise created by thoughts and physical sensations.
At first the thoughts come in torrents, like crashing waves. Eventually, they slow down. My mind becomes more like a still lake with sparkles of sunlight glinting off the water.
At that point, I can actually see where thoughts begin and end. And in the gap between two thoughts is a space.
In that space, I’m aware but not thinking.
This is the space that the meditation and yoga teachers talk about. Getting to that space is the purpose of their teachings.
I get there through silence.
At the end of a meditation, when you are feeling more peaceful, stronger, and happier, remind yourself that these feelings came about not because you got something you thought you needed, or because you fooled somebody into thinking that you are worthy of his or her love and affection, but rather because you simply quieted down your mind enough to experience what we all have, all of the time, if we just remember — DEAN ORNISH