What is it about occasional or regular periods of silence that is so nourishing for so many people? Did it begin with our ancient ancestors having to be quiet during hunts or having to be quiet when a bear or lion was nearby? Or was it those spontaneous moments of silence like witnessing a beautiful sunset?
I remember moments of silence in my childhood, fishing in a lake with my father before dawn, watching a beautiful Arizona sunset with my mother. As I grew older, I felt the nourishment of moments of silence sometimes during church and then during some meditations.
I first introduced silence in my classes at Keene State during the Iraqi war in 1993. I told the students that I didn’t want to engage in conversation or debate but I couldn’t just pretend it wasn’t happening. I began each class with 2 minutes of silence. Students could do what they wanted as long as they were silent. In each class, after a couple of weeks, I asked the students anonymously (on blank sheets of paper) to say yes or no to continuing the silence. In all classes, the response was overwhelmingly yes.
In the following semesters, I introduced silence at the beginning of the semester. Over time, I taught simple mindfulness practices like awareness of breath, and I always made the silence optional. The result was that the overwhelming number of students found silence valuable.
Several years later, I made mindfulness integral in several interdisciplinary courses I was teaching. In those classes I taught awareness of breath, of body, of thoughts and emotions, and the loving-kindness meditation. At the end of each course, on the anonymous course evaluation, I asked students to tell me if they thought I should have more, less, or the same amount of mindfulness meditations in future classes. I did this three times and the overwhelming response was more!
Whenever I teach meditation, I occasionally open my eyes during a longer meditation to check in on how people are doing. I do this especially at the county jail where I teach meditation each week. I am always moved by people’s faces. Even though many say their mind is often busy during meditation, the faces are generally calm.
Last month I reread Silence by Christina Feldman, a book I dearly love. It is amazingly inexpensive ($11 on Amazon) given that it is printed on glossy paper and there are beautiful photographs on almost every page. I share three passages from the book.
“The moments of silence we encounter invite us to be still, to listen deeply, and to be present in this world. The glimpses of silence we meet remind us of a way of being in which we are deeply touched by the mystery and grandeur of life. In the midst of silence we remember what it feels like to be truly alive, receptive, and sensitive. Silence, we come to understand, is the language of the heart.”
“What difference would it make to our lives if we allowed ourselves as much time and attention to the cultivation of calmness and stillness as we give to producing and doing. Learning to live an intentional life.”
“Instead of fleeing from or avoiding the chaos of our psychological, emotional landscape, we learn to bring a gentle, clear attentiveness to it. The most direct way of doing this is to turn toward those inner places that are most wounded and chaotic…We begin to understand that the inner turmoil is a result of the many moments of incomplete attention we brought to the encounters of our day, the inner agitation that has compelled us to haste, and the times we have become simply lost in our expectations, wants, plans, and thoughts. All of this can be transformed as we come to understand that the life of engagement, activity, and creativity does not preordain a sentence of agitation and anxiety.”
I encourage readers to experiment with inviting moments of silence into your days.
Try this for a week or two—it might become a habit!
• When waking up
• Before beginning a meal
• In nature: listening to the wind, to the birds…
• In the city: the noises around you. This is your life now.
• At occasional moments during the day.