I have heard that "the retreat begins the minute you sign up for it," and that the integration of work done on retreat will take a month for everyday spent on the retreat.
On Labor Day of this year, I completed a 42 day retreat. I was silent for 40 days of this retreat.
This is the longest I have ever maintained silence, since I first became verbal. The next longest was during a 21 day retreat in 1985, and even then I communicated (a note, a shrug) every other day or so when my retreat guide visited me.
I wanted to see if silence would be a way to focus upon the completion of a writing project. I have a huge procrastination habit, and I wanted provide a structure where this project could emerge without a huge angst at the end, a painful and terrifying push to completion. I wanted to create in a relaxed and pleasurable way.
I still procrastinated; 42 days seems like a long time at the beginning. It was super challenging to find a rhythm of writing that worked for me. And there are so many other things to be done!
I was committed to my morning practice. I wrote for at least 2 hours a day. I worked in my gardens or in food preserving daily. I cooked and cleaned and slept. This left about 8 hours each day of ‘free time.’ I quickly realized that if I didn’t do something that was focused upon this work, I would fall into my habits of numbing out.
So, I cleaned my altars, and started embroidering an altar cloth. I got out my paints and began painting a canvas, Lord Shiva as Nataraja under a waning crescent. It is dark, and rich, and brown, and I don’t actually know if I ‘like’ it very much, but the process is very dark, and rich, and well, brown.
And I have been writing more, much more than my intention of at least 2 hours a day. It is joyous.
And hard.
And neither joyous nor hard.
I think the joyous part is easy to see. Quiet. A stillness. An ability to find a rhythm independent of the rhythm of other people. A sweetening of the voices in my head (see below).
But the hard part wasn’t about not speaking. It was about not speaking while being immersed in language. Every day I wrote for 2 hours, often more. When I wasn’t totally focused upon something else, I was ‘writing’ this project in my head. Yet, if I said OUCH when I stubbed my toe, the shattering of silence with my voice was loud and invasive.
In the late 70’s, I observed Ramadan with a small group at the Abode of The Message. This was not traditional for the community, nor was it suggested by our teacher, Pir Vilayat, we just wanted to do the practice. We met to do zikr, a traditional Sufi Practice, early in the morning, and after that, but before one could discern the difference between a black thread and a white one in the pre-dawn dimness, we would begin our day with a small feast. And then we would not eat or drink again until sundown.
Fasting isn’t really that challenging, after a few days you get out of the rhythm of eating. But fasting only during the daylight hours for an entire lunar cycle? Next to impossible! Because everyday was essentially the first day of the fast all over again. The first day, when I wander about in the kitchen, wondering what not to eat. The first day when I have to remind myself over and over again that I am not eating. Consequently, food is always a priority in my mind, that first day of a fast. And Ramadan was a month of first days.
This silence was like that. I wasn’t tempted to speak to other people so much. I stayed in my own space, for the entire retreat.
But at times the cacophony of conversations that took place in my head was deafening.
And because I was still checking email every couple of days (I had some obligations that I was not able to delegate), I would occasionally get a message from a friend. It was especially frequent during the second to last week. Perhaps my friends did not know I was on silence, or forgot and suddenly wondered where I was. But there were often requests for information, a plea for help from a student traveling in abroad, a nostalgic ‘poke’ from an old lover, a plaintive cry from a current lover. These I found nearly impossible to ignore. The echoes of their messages kept penetrating my stillness, until I remembered the story of the two Buddhist monks.
Two monks pass a broken bridge, and a woman who wishes to pass over the river. One monk picks her up and carries her through the water to the other side. And miles later, the other monk berates him for violating his vows. The wise monk says, I put her down on the other side of the river, yet you are still carrying her all these hours later.
So, if the call became so loud that I could not ignore it, I would write a short reply. And that was interesting as well. My Internal Critical Voice (aka, Mean Auntie) had a heyday with this.
“Do you think you are so important that people must hear from you?” said Mean Auntie.
“What? They can’t go two more weeks?”
“Do you think you are so important that you cannot respond to a genuine request for help? They're in a foreign land, they don't even speak the language, they need you. Who do you think you are? Too HOLY to come down from silence to help your friends?”
“Do you think your friend/ student so incapable that they need you to carry them?”
“What about your vow…do you think it is okay just to throw it off whenever you please?” and on and on.
I had wanted to see if by maintaining silence for an extended period of time, the inner critical voice would quiet down, maybe even shut up entirely. Well, silence has shifted the Inner Critical Voice, but of course in a way I did not expect. Mean Auntie did relax. She still pipes up from time to time, and when she does, I am able to say, “Hello! There you are! Would you like some tea?” And I experience Mean Auntie becoming softer toward me, less critical. Almost not ‘Mean’ Auntie at all. Thanks to my life coach, Linda Bark, and our work together, I have identified Mean Auntie's job, and it is to help me recognize patterns of behavior/ responses that do not serve me, that limit me. Over the years, I grew afraid of her hyper-vigilance. I would metaphorically run and hide when she spoke up, and then she would become a little rougher, more insistent. Silence has allowed her to relax a bit, to emerge as a helpful friend. Maybe soon, she will be simply my Cool Auntie.
In tantric terms, my Mean Auntie is the Yin Masculine focused only on the “Well, that hasn’t worked before,” role.
This note could have been entitled Tapas; it is one of the biggest experiments in Tapas I have ever run. But it is also a Pleasure, and it has to do with Relationship, especially my relationship with myself. And Work, as I intended specifically to produce a project during the silence. So ultimately I thought it best that it stand alone.