How Silence Offers Powerful Healing
Meditation is a living experiment, and my heart, body, and mind is the lab.
The notion that silence contains healing power is virtually ignored in Western culture. Maybe laughable. All my life, urgency drove me to find solutions to my problems — right now — by talking about them. More therapy, devouring spiritual books, fixing me, fixing my loved ones. It drove me kinda crazy, actually. And my family. Fear and control were the engines that drove me, and the urgency of it was another kind of noise.
Silence is very complex. There‘s way more to it than the absence of noise, much more than keeping your mouth shut. The silence between people can feel cold and tense…or warm and uplifting.
Giving someone the silent treatment, avoiding difficult but necessary conversations, failing to speak out against injustice: All are forms of silence that drive people apart, creating isolation, feeding injustice. Silence can be a form of erasure; the “crazy” relative who died young that no one in the family ever refers to. That may seem inconsequential, but it can have big ramifications in a family when even speaking someone’s name is taboo. Politically, forced silence is a weapon of oppression. Unjust powers excuse their actions by silencing voices of protest. See? No one minds what we’re doing!
