Healing the Pain of Silence

For most modern westerners silence feels empty at first, boring, something that needs to be filled.  When we are given encouragement and space to really enter and stay with it, silence can become filled with beauty, with gratitude, with life.                                   ~Seena B. Frost, Soul Collage Evolving

I often hear people talk about silence making them feel lonely or uncomfortable, afraid or reprimanded.  These feelings and a myriad of other feelings lead people to avoid silence when with others, preferring to be constantly stimulated in order to drive away those feelings.

And yet one of the things I know about spiritual disciplines, such as silence, is that there is a symbiotic relationship.  What I mean is that experiencing God in the silence alone enhances our presence in community and being in silence in community enhances our presence in solitude.

The experience people have in communal silence can enriched silence when alone.  Over time silence is filled with Presence, the gentle God who is always with us.  It is never that God is sometimes not with us but it is that we are often not aware of God's presence.  Silence heightens our awareness.

Silence teaches us how to "be" in the silence.  What perhaps people need is not to run from silence but to lengthen and embrace silence.  In the beginning this is very difficult because if we open ourselves up to the Presence who IS silence many painful things begin to emerge, like loneliness.  Sometimes, memories of being silenced by others, especially in childhood emerge.  We may also find feelings of unhealed grief, inadequacy, unworthiness, shame, deep pain, other lost memories, and fears of the future ... just to name a few of the things we may have tucked away hoping never to encounter again.  If we can bring any of those pesky feelings that emerge into the Light to be understood, accepted and let go, then perhaps we become more integrated and whole.   Yes, it is a difficult process but also one that brings the fruits of healing, wholeness, and integration. 

We are invited to ask ourselves about the feelings and the thoughts that emerge.  When we confront long dormant reasons for our feelings of desolation, we may find out why silence is such a painful visitor.  

Hear this beautiful poetry from Rumi and ponder.

The Guest House

This being human is a guest house.
Every morning a new arrival.

A joy, a depression, a meanness,
some momentary awareness comes
as an unexpected visitor.

Welcome and entertain them all!
Even if they are a crowd of sorrows,
who violently sweep your house
empty of its furniture,
still, treat each guest honorably.
He may be clearing you out
for some new delight.

The dark thought, the shame, the malice.
meet them at the door laughing and invite them in.

Be grateful for whatever comes.
because each has been sent
as a guide from beyond.

— Jellaludin Rumi,
translation by Coleman Barks

 

Questions for Reflection:

• How difficult is the silence for you?
• What are some of the feelings that emerge for you?
• How is your soul like a guesthouse? 
• Who has come visiting you lately?
• How have you welcomed the stranger within?
• How has that "stranger" been sent to guide you?