Retreats and Therapy: The Power of Silence
E. Kubler-Ross once noted that people need to more often revisit silence within themselves and realize all of life’s purposes include learning from our despairing experiences. Suffering may be a hidden source of being blessed with new inner knowledge. Personal suffering if not too, too great may also strengthen us from the inside out. Recently Amoda Maa Jeevan has informed us that there are many core meanings of being in silence at meditation retreats. To make things more clear I will simply list some of her conclusions. Here are things to keep in mind about silence at retreats and therapy. Most spiritual traditions use it as a primary process.
- Silence allows our minds to rest and interpersonal contact to be reduced. It brings us back to ourselves.
- Silence helps us obtain relief from day-to-day stressors, pressures, and busyness.
- Silence may contribute to higher consciousness and personal transformation.
- Silence may be a curative elixir against troubling thoughts, emotions, behaviors, struggles, preferences, resentments, and general suffering.
- Silence may open doorways to calm and clarity.
- Silence reminds us to remain in the present moment no matter what happens. Silence thus helps us to get out of the past and have less fear of the future.
- Silence may free us from over-identification and even projective identification with various forms of psychological attachment, disappointment, betrayal, and pain.
- Silence, as a fundamental meditation teaching, may open up healing of self from trauma, fear, addictions, and other destructive emotions.
- Silence is a form of essential nature, and it allows greater depth of self-inquiry.
- Silence may help to liberate us from typical painful psychological past attachments and fears of the future. Thus it may unblock our energies and emotional movements.
- Silence brings us to the gate of surrender, where we may decide to enter deeply into the self-loving, self-cherishing container of the self. It helps float us slowly into the areas of past pain and suffering, but this time with new soothing energies from within. Rupert Spira in Being Aware of Being Aware, sees silent conscious knowing (awareness) as being a constant while the known is always impermanent/changing.
For more information refer to Amoda Maa Jeevan (2017). Embodied Enlightenment: Living Your Awakening in Every Moment. Oakland, CA: New Harbinger Publications/Non-Duality Press.
Anthony R. Quintiliani, PhD., LADC
From the Eleanor R. Liebman Center for Secular Meditation in Monkton, Vermont
Author of Mindful Happiness
stress and reactivity over the holidays and time with family, see the edited listing below. I have added some skills that were not included in the Sounds True listing.
phenomena are highly represented in noted meditation practices. Therefore,, this can be considered an advanced post on the topic. The following general steps will note aspects of the meditation sequence. We begin with the idea that all realness related to perceptions of I/Me/Mine are imputed through thoughts and the projections of the mind. Humans tend to experience I/Me/Mine and objects of awareness as real, concrete, substantial, and permanent entities. This is one reason why we cherish human life so, so much. To open up awareness and experience to the opposites of these characteristics, we need to focus meditative practice within a series of specific steps. These modified steps are noted below.
body or mind that is ill. If the experience is and is not part of the aggregates then it cannot exist inherently, ultimately. It is only our contemporary experience that is being mind-body registered. It is the working of the “mistaken minds” (p. 194).
body reacted, and that the whole is NOT the sum of its parts. Collective parts of the body and mind do not constitute the whole of the person. Here, again, we confront the most difficult understanding of ultimate reality – that the self is impermanent, insubstantial, dependent on causes and effects, a projection of mind, and an illusion – it is empty.
The following guided meditation is a combination meditation from