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
recognize this is simply all part of normal life experience for us humans. It is also suggesting that you learn and use various “wise mind” skills and practices (mindfulness, meditation, RAIN, yoga, walking meditation, etc.) to help yourself feel and do/be better in life. Rupert Spira in various writings highly influenced by classical Vedanta boiled it down into a few very important understanding – understanding about the way things are, and how we consciously experience the way things are. In the use of laughter to nudge you out of suffering, we may want to pay attention to some of his key ideas. Along with the recognition of wasting lots of emotional energy trying to change what happens to us in primary suffering, it may help to recognize that just allowing or radically accepting what our experience is in this present moment is a form of ultimate truth. Emphasizing neither the body nor the mind in experiencing suffering, we may want to realize that it is simply our conscious awareness of present-moment suffering that makes it so hard to be with it in peace. Being more aware and being more able to just be with your experience no matter what it is are important skills in life. Preferences for pleasant self-objects, other people as objects, things as objects,emotions as objects, and our personal experience as objects – all these associated desires and related cognitive-emotional-behavioral consequences simply produce greater suffering. Once we are skilledenough to just be with our suffering as a part of life, we may be better equipped to become a happier person. Inner quiet, equanimity, liking and loving, loving kindness, compassion, as well as a deeper understanding of reality are all part of moving though suffering and, perhaps, into more happiness. The conditioned mind and body may still seek sense pleasures (short-term joys but 
ultimately long-term causes of suffering), but eventually we may understand that trying to attach/hold onto pleasant emotions and trying to avoid unpleasant emotions gets us nowhere. Pleasant and unpleasant are simply part of the larger life-picture of what is. So what about laughter in all of this?
something, and weight loss. Adding “forced laughter” via laughing yoga or eye-contacted, face-to-face laughter did get people to laugh. Since people had to decide whether or not to cooperate, the terms “forced laughter” may be inappropriate. Since, according to certain neuroscience opinions, the body cannot recognize differences in authentic laughter and forced laughter – this research may be quite meaningful. Also, again from neuroscience research, we know that facial emotional expressions find their way into the brain. Like the body, the brain (other than exaggerated executive criticism) cannot differentiate natural laughter from other forms of laughter. The more and longer people laughed, the better the outcomes were.
