Shhh

My week at a silent yoga/meditation retreat in the spectacularly beautiful mid-coast region of Maine was revenge, I suspect, for shushing approximately 1300 teenagers in the dozen years I stood in front of a high-school English class. Not talking was something I hadn’t practiced since I was the one facing the chalkboard. And guess what? At age 54, having paid more than $1,000 for the privilege of being silent, this retired schoolteacher got in trouble for talking.

Let me back up. My friend Wendy invited me to go with her to Rolling Meadows retreat in Brooks, Maine, to do yoga, practice breath work, meditate, eat vegetarian food, and walk among wildflowers and grazing sheep on a 100-acre farm in 70-degree weather during a record heat wave at home in Dallas. The catch, of course, was the vow of silence.

The retreat’s website promised a get-acquainted dinner on arrival night, so I was comforted that I would meet my seven fellow campers before we all fell mute. But because our flight was delayed, Wendy and I arrived two hours too late to participate in the bonding; in fact, we arrived just as everyone disappeared into the meditation room, having already exchanged their where-are-you-from’s over an unseasoned ayurvedic stew. It was a deficit I keenly felt for the remainder of the week…and one for which I ultimately was grateful.

The gentle host (husband of our guru, Patricia, for this women-only spiritual event) hefted our bags up the stairs, settling me into a dormer room that destined me to smack my head dozens of times before I got the hang of squat-walking. I unpacked on my knees and (literally) crawled into bed, having encountered only one other camper, fresh from meditation, who walked through the kitchen and gave me the librarian finger-on-lip salute when I inappropriately and cheerily said, “Hi!” I had yet to drink the Kool-Aid; it was at first a bitter brew.

Monday dawned (at a shocking 4:45 a.m. this far north), and I crept downstairs in my yoga gear about 7:00 for my cup of herbal tea. We all were assigned a mug and a cloth napkin set on a kitchen shelf handily labeled with our names. The caffeine-free tea did nothing for my pounding head, which I took into the sunny yoga room for 7:30 meditation. Headache-free a half hour later, I slowly and silently ate my oatmeal with fruit compote and plain, non-fat yogurt, and it was…8:20 in the morning. The next official event was yoga at 10:30. What would I do for two hours??

I walked on the damp, mowed path into the woods; the sun was warm and birds were singing…it was good. Yoga at 10:30 was even better. I often take a morning yoga class at home, so except for the lack of chatter before and after class, this seemed normal. As soon as we rose from corpse pose, we gathered for lunch…a big bowl of tofu and broccoli with brown rice. No oil, no salt, no spice to relieve its…unstimulating…effect. But, like eating on an airplane, it was something to do. The next yoga class wasn’t until 4:00. Although I woke early, all I had done was sit, eat, stretch and eat. A nap was hardly called for.

Wendy whispered that she was up for a walk. We found the pond and, far from the house, were enjoying some forbidden conversation when another camper, at 33 the youngest, a Canadian, joined us. We fearlessly spoke to her, sure that we outranked her in some way. But when another camper arrived, this one a 54-year-old sun-fried ski instructor from Colorado (as I would later learn), we clammed up. I wandered back to the house for my cell phone, hid it under my shirt, and discovered that you could get a strong signal (and no one could see you) at the highest point of the road a quarter-mile from the house.

I left my husband a message he likened to one a kid at camp might leave his parents to guilt them for sentencing him to a fortnight of tuna casserole and chiggers. It was such a long whine that I had to call back to leave a second voice mail. Even so, it was still an hour ’til afternoon yoga, so back in the house, I found a comfortable chair and stared into space until the Tibetan bowl called us to our mats. Again, yoga was good, but dinner was some beet and hard-boiled egg concoction that just made me sad. I slipped upstairs and downed a handful (okay, two) of chocolate-covered sunflower seeds, the contraband snack I had studiously packed for its nutritional ambiguity.

Hey! What about a nice hot shower? That should put a dent in the hour before evening meditation, and I won’t even be tempted to talk! At 8:30, the day was done, and I returned to my mouse hole upstairs, bumping my head seven more times before crawling under the covers. It was 68 degrees in my room with a soft breeze wafting in and, although it was forbidden, I dug out a crime thriller I had brought with me. Encouraged to bring only spiritual texts, I dutifully packed Eckhart Tolle, but I’d been virtuous enough for one day.

Tuesday dawned just as early as Monday did, and my stomach was rumbling. For the record, the yoga/meditation room often sounded like a lion’s cage with the growling and roaring and gurgitating that went on at every gathering. It was all the whole grains and cruciferous vegetables. The noise was deafening after one unfortunate pairing of black bean soup and broccoli. The GasMaker, I dubbed it. Funny in retrospect, but on that second morning, I succumbed to the combination of low blood sugar, imposed silence and another 5 days with an empty dance card. I found Wendy and vomited up my frustration in a frantic whisper.

But, it was time for meditation, so what could I do but shuffle into the yoga room and find my meditation cushion? I closed my eyes. The soft morning breeze cooled the space, the birds sang melodiously, stomachs growled compatibly, and my jaw began to relax. If you’ve met the Borg on any of the myriad versions of Star Trek, you know the phrase, “Resistance is futile.” I had just finished watching the entire 7-year Voyager season, and the words popped into my head, making me smile. Then tears rolled…quiet ones. I blotted them with Kleenex from a box our guru wisely kept nearby; I think all but one of us cried at some point during the week. Some cried daily.

My little shower cleared the clouds from my chest. When meditation was over, I felt…giddy. I had adapted, as the Borg promise. I practically skipped into the kitchen for lunch. The patio table just outside the kitchen looked inviting, so I settled there. The young Canadian girl sat next to me; joining us was another woman who had indicated some interest in knowing me during an allowed “sharing” session in yoga. Effervescent, I forgot myself and whispered some social niceties, to which they replied. Overlooking us, from the kitchen window, was our guru, a strapping white-haired cat-eyed goddess whose approval I most definitely wanted. She approached our table and, in the softest, most reasonable voice you can imagine, reminded us of the silence. I took my spanking; I was a little embarrassed, chastened…and most impressed with her argument. “It’s the only way I know how to do this,” she said. “We are all so relational that once we start, it’s impossible to stop.”

It took another day or so for me to understand the value of the silence. How little of it we get in our daily lives, what with radio, television, telephones, traffic, air conditioners and, of course, people. Even the people we love (especially the people we love?) frequently pop some thought bubble we’ve entered and find difficult to re-enter after an interruption. Among strangers, silence allows you to quiet your ego, to avoid talking about where you’ve been, what you know, who you know, what you believe, and how much it costs. Even better, it protects you from others’ egos. Do I really need to hear about some stranger’s bad marriage? Another’s hospitalization for depression? The recent widow’s grief? The single mom’s sadness?

All these stories emerged in brief at the final yoga session of the week. So this is what I was spared. Instead of being lured into involuntary expressions of compassion, I was able to mull things over, to write in my journal, to fix my binoculars on a woodpecker long enough to know it was a Hairy not a Downy, to see wild turkeys lift off the ground with a great commotion, to inspect the vegetable garden and the sheep without comment, to hear frogs that sounded porcine, to listen to the wind rustle birch leaves, to wake to the sound of rain on my dormer window. Silence, I learned, is deeply restful. Once the world’s distractions (the ones we’re so attached to) fade away, it’s just you sitting there. And, dull as that may be, it is restful.

Just before the retreat was over, I left a note, a kind of apology, for Patricia on the iron stove that, in summer, serves only as a gathering place for papers and books. It was something I thought of during a solitary walk. I wrote:

The rest is silence (Act 5, Hamlet)

The silence is rest (Marcia Smith, retreat-er)

In the end, I had drunk the Kool-Aid, tepid and sugar-free as it was. And Wendy and I talked non-stop all the way home to Dallas.