“Silence teaches us to go down inside ourselves to find real life rather than to reach for it always and forever outside ourselves”.
So, Sr. Joan Chittister reminds us.
I witness much fear in the consulting room, but none compares with that which some show in the presence silence. It requires much effort to resist the compulsion to break a silence, especially when the client appears tortured by it. Some just won’t allow it. But if real life is to be found then, allowing it, we must. If silence allows for a meeting with our real selves surely this is something to not just be welcomed and encouraged, but also something to be celebrated.
Such a fearful response reveals how so many carry an image of themselves as someone who is so horrific as to be not allowed and therefore distracted from at every possible opportunity. Such are the tragic consequences of internalised toxicity rooted in experiences of shaming, humiliation, rejection not being ‘good enough’ and of course being considered ‘other’. No wonder the noise of life has become so essential. Silence for many is a risk too great.
However fact remains, emergence of the real self absolutely does require silence. How else in this world will it ever get a chance? Silence provides us with the harrowing ground of the soul. It breaks up the clods and boulders of our lives. It roots out the weeds, it levels the rocky and unstable ground in which we’ve grown.
When silence faces us with our own cries of fear, pain and resistance then the knowing of ourselves is without doubt happening. It is only in silence that these things can be addressed and only by that process can the real self emerge.
Getting beyond the fear of real self and silence, means disengaging from all that blocks us and keeps us separated from whom we really are and have ever been.
It is in silence that fear can be confronted and its darkness removed. It is in silence that we move into greater light and growth. This very process of darkness into light, inherent in nature, is constantly occurring all around us. We need silence to notice and in noticing be assured.
Silence is not to be restricted to the limits of the clinicians consulting room, vital in fact that its not. The therapy room is by its nature removed from real life. At best it is a box of mirrors. No, real life happens outside the therapy room and it is in real life that we so need to allow for, integrate and enable occasions of crucial life giving silence.
This wonderful quote from Leslie Kane provides encouraging example on example of allowed for silence in daily life and where we don’t need to have a word:
“The dumb silence of apathy, the sober silence of solemnity, the fertile silence of awareness, the active silence of perception, the baffled silence of confusion, the uneasy silence of impasse, the muzzled silence of outrage, the expectant silence of waiting, the reproachful silence of censure, the tacit silence of approval, the vituperative silence of accusation, the eloquent silence of awe, the unnerving silence of menace, the peaceful silence of communion and the irrevocable silence of death Illustrate by their unspoken response to speech that experiences exist for which we lack the word”.
Silence can begin today, it can fill today and can start by courageously asking the most challenging question of all: What is it that we are hiding from that our flight into noise holds at bay?
Br. Stephen Morris fcc
