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
