During the twelve-month gap between undergrad at Penn and postgraduate studies at Harvard Divinity School, one year into my Buddhist practice, I felt it was the right time for a five-day silent meditation retreat. I had heard from other practitioners how transformational sustained silence could be, although more seasoned enlightenment seekers cautioned me to go into the experience with as few expectations as possible.
The retreat center in western Massachusetts implored us to put away any books, journals, and, of course, phones upon arrival. We were to observe “noble silence,” refraining from speaking as well as communicating through other means such as written notes, body language, and even eye contact. From five a.m. until nine p.m., activities were to be completed mindfully, each step taken with extreme concentration. We would chew our meals slowly and put our utensils down between each bite. We were encouraged to avert our eyes if we passed another soul en route to meals or meditation.
I had been eager to leave the cacophonous environment of Philadelphia, but sitting with strangers in a noiseless retreat center in the middle of nowhere to undertake eight (or more) hours of meditation each day was, to put it simply, very hard. I was exhausted from sitting in the lotus position for hours, body aching, but also restless from the lack of stimulation. The teachers would remind us to trust the process, but every second was relentlessly felt—not in a good way. I fell into bed the second night, stiff, hoping this practice would pay off.
A somatic marvel occurred on the third morning. The pain in my body had disappeared while I slept the second night, and this day of stillness came easier. I began experiencing intense emotional release after meditations. I’d slip into my room to cry about nothing in particular before the gong rang for the next session. On the fourth and fifth days, I felt a sense of ease and understanding that I had never felt before. My mind had quieted, and so my world had changed. I remember walking outside the retreat center during sunrise, seeing the orange sun glistening off freshly fallen snow and sobbing on a bench out of joy and gratitude, as if I just now had seen snow for the very first time. I looked at my evening cup of chamomile tea as if God had brewed me the tea with her own hands. I began to shed worries about how people perceived me. One trivial example: The first day I did my usual painstakingly long makeup and hair routine, hyperaware of my self-presentation. By the end, I entered the meditation hall knowing I was not being judged or scrutinized. The hall was filled, but there was no one to perform for.
At the end of the retreat, the noble silence was broken, and we all went to one final lunch together. We eased into speaking by turning to the person next to us and simply asking how they were feeling. Never having spoken to any of them before, I felt a deep sense of community and comfort as we talked about the vulnerable things that had brought many of us to silent meditation. Following the retreat, I was newly sensitive to all aspects of life. Once I got home, I made my weekly call to my grandmother in Qom. As soon as I heard her voice, I burst into tears. I wasn’t sad—just moved by the love that connected us.
Our retreat teachers warned us not to expect this incubated access to peace and happiness to last. For a good five hours after the retreat, I didn’t turn on my phone. Even off, the screen was abnormal and grating. I feared returning to my old life of incessant chatter and distractions in a jangly city where I had to gear up just to leave the apartment. And my fears were correct. Back in Center City, a noisy and bustling part of Philly, the natural high of gratitude and unconditional love for myself and others quickly began to fade. I found myself returning to familiar thought patterns of judgment toward myself and the people around me. It is, of course, only human to get swept up in distractions, and the conditions of the retreat center were perfectly controlled to facilitate what Buddhists call loving-kindness (unconditional love and compassion toward oneself and others). In the process of accepting the impermanence of these wondrous emotions, I learned a valuable lesson that still guides my own practice: Without silence, it is impossible to know and notice oneself. And if we cannot know ourselves, we have no chance of seeing into the hearts of others.
The psychologist Carol Gilligan’s influential 1982 book, In a Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Women’s Development, examines how women’s moral voices have been marginalized and silenced, and how we are socialized not to speak the truth about what has happened to us. As a daughter of the late 1990s, the feminist praxis I observed growing up was command centric, a bit like Simon Says (or Simone Says): Speak up! Speak out! Lean in! “Choosing” to be silent as a woman seemed like a cliché at best and a surrender to misogyny at worst.
In school I discovered another perspective within developmental psychology that helped me understand silence. Donald Winnicott describes the “holding environment” as a nurturing and supportive space provided by caregivers to facilitate healthy development in infancy and childhood. The holding environment involves both physical care and emotional attunement, allowing children to feel secure and supported in exploring their environment and developing a sense of self. In his studies of adolescent girls, he found that whispering and secrecy became a source of power for girls, who were subjects of unwanted probing by others at school. Winnicott describes this phenomenon as “a protest . . . of being infinitely exploited. In another language this would be the fantasy of being eaten or swallowed up. In [our] language it is the fantasy of being found.” For many women, the experience of youth becomes a playground for exploring when and when not to speak, a practice of strategy that can keep a young girl safe from threats in her environment. To refrain from speech, oftentimes, is not passive submission. In fact, it is arduous. Ask any mother who has held her tongue in a fiery family quarrel to maintain civility among her household.
Silence certainly holds power in our daily interpersonal lives. What do we make of silence when collective injustice must be fought? To transform our society, some look to democratic elections, while others may opt to participate in violent and nonviolent protest. Some have been disillusioned by action of any kind. But can there be power in inaction? This sentiment is repeatedly expressed in Laozi’s Tao Te Ching:
The Tao does nothing, but leaves nothing undone. If powerful men could center themselves in it the whole world would be transformed by itself, in its natural rhythms. When life is simple, pretenses fall away; our essential natures shine through. . . . . . . . . . When there is silence, one finds the anchor of the universe within oneself.
Even in the modern age, silence has its own political-activist tradition, particularly in Zen Buddhist anarchism, a movement which began in twentieth-century Korea and China as a response to Western imperialism. The practice eventually gained popularity in American countercultural spaces in the mid-twentieth century. John Cage is perhaps remembered as one of the most iconic figures of this movement. As an anarchist, composer, poet, and Zen Buddhist, Cage took on the role of spiritual and political teacher in his own musical compositions, wielding the power of silence. In 1952 he performed the score of his magnum opus 4′ 33″ live. He entered the stage, sat down at a piano, and throughout the four minutes and thirty-three seconds of quiet, his only physical movements involved opening and closing the piano lid at the start of each of the three movements.
This aspect of the performance borrows the Zen Buddhist practice of silent contemplation and meditation. An inherent feature of sitting in a state of silence is the act of listening. Anarchists emphasize the importance of consensus, listening to one another, and maintaining awareness of one another’s presence. Listening has also been championed as an integral aspect of feminist ethical practice. Cage’s queer identity, too, is significant in analyzing his extensive use of silence as a form of resistance. As an artist during the Cold War, at a time when the DSM still categorized homosexuality as a mental illness, he was forced to withhold his identity. For Cage, silence was the ultimate form of resistance in homophobic society. By not explicitly denying his sexual orientation, he avoided complacency, and by not coming out of the closet, he avoided legal and social repercussions.
Silence opens us to the opportunity to come face-to-face with the “Other.” The French philosopher Emmanuel Levinas theorized that encountering the Other disrupts our self-centeredness, and that ethical human interaction—subjecting ourselves to the needs of others—must be paramount over any other philosophy or conscious action. Feminist theologian Daphne Hampson points out that modern women philosophers have a knack for shaping moral philosophy toward a virtue ethics of “seeing” or “attentiveness” to another being. In her essay “That Which Is God,” Hampson writes:
Unless a person attains to a certain centeredness, she is not able to be truly present to others; while it is as we are receptive of the multiple influences upon us that we come to be a centered, rather than amorphous, self. People who enable mental or physical healing, who at a distance are able to be “present” to others, who are translucent of “God,” impress us as integrated but, also and therefore, profoundly open. . . . The experience of meditation, for example, could be valuable here.
Certainly the mental centeredness I experienced during my silent meditation retreat allowed me to be more open to the immediate needs of others; I felt like a great moral imperative from the universe was revealed to me. French philosopher Luce Irigaray would say this is par for the course; in her essay “Toward a Divine in the Feminine,” she writes:
[I]n the Western tradition words are favored in relation to silence, this is not the case in certain Eastern traditions. For Hegel, the end of our journey ought to be a gathering of all possible discourses. In contrast, for the Buddha it ought to be becoming able to reach silence. Of course, silence does not then amount to a lack of words but to the safeguarding of that which has not yet been manifested, of that which has not yet appeared, of that which does not yet exist.
An ethic of silence, while a seemingly small act, can impact our conception of the divine and of the world around us. It has the power to transform us into patient, compassionate beings that can find echoes of God in our everyday interactions. A widespread culture of compassion is the foundation for a just, moral society. Without it, any attempt to materially change our structures will fail, just as reformist policies and radical revolutions alike have eventually eroded in their vigor and spirit, giving way to the same oppressive structures with which they began. A political revolution without a revolution of the mind is futile. Feminists and anarchists have known this for decades.
The beloved Coptic poem “The Thunder, Perfect Mind,” discovered from the Nag Hammadi Library, helps to illuminate the power of silence. Spoken from the perspective of the feminine singular, the orator says:
I am the silence that is incomprehensible
and the idea whose remembrance is frequent.
I am the voice whose sound is manifold
and the word whose appearance is multiple.
She describes herself with four identifiers: the silence, the idea, the voice, and the word. She is, at once, all of these things. The poem progresses from a state of the “incomprehensible” to “frequent” to “manifold” to “multiple.” Silence, at the root of this progression, eventually allows the orator to have her existence made known and multiplied. Though the contents of this poem appear paradoxical in nature, there exists no inherent contradiction in the nature of these four identifiers. To choose silence is a courageous act of becoming, a step toward wholeness.
I have returned to sustained silent meditation since that first foray eighteen months ago—a one-day retreat and a three-day retreat. They weren’t as profound, but they were times for reflection. I know now that holding silence, whether inside or outside the meditation hall, makes each of my interactions with others a little more divine.
Reading Ritual
To help you tune out all the noise and tune into something deeper, try:
NOVEL
Pure Colour: A Novel by Sheila Heti (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2022)
SELF-HELP
Radical Acceptance: Embracing Your Life with the Heart of a Buddha by Tara Brach (Bantam, 2003)
FOLKLORE
Women Who Run with the Wolves: Myths and Stories of the Wild Woman Archetype by Clarissa Pinkola Estés (Ballantine Books, 1992)
FRENCH THEORY
This Sex Which Is Not One by Luce Irigaray, translated by Catherine Porter with Carolyn Burke (Cornell University Press, 1985)
CLASSIC
Tao Te Ching by Laozi (various translations, 300 BC)
