Episode 8: The Power Of Silence

In this short episode I take a brief look at the power of silence, and how practicing being in silence can have a profound effect on our wellbeing.

I refer to my own experiences during a 10 day silent Vipassana Meditation retreat, and talk about why in our modern society we might be talking too much and not listening enough.

In the episode I read from the beautiful book "Be As You Are" The Teachings of Sri Ramana Maharshi, Edited by David Godman 

Find out more about Vipassnana silent retreats in the Uk here, but they also offer retreats worldwide: https://www.dhamma.org/en/schedules/noncenter/uk

I mentioned a fascinating podcast episode with Dr. Rangan Chatterjee and Erling Kagge- the Norwegian explorer unfortunately I cant seem to link it here: Its called Feel Better Live More and its episode number 551: Silence As medecine: How Moments of Stillness Transform Your Brain, Body & Emotional Health.

If you have any comments, questions or anything you would like to hear about related to this podcast, I'd love to hear from you.

Please feel free to message me on Instagram or email me here: helen@feettoearthyoga.co.uk

You can follow me on Instagram here: https://www.instagram.com/feettoearthyoga/?hl=en

Or why not find out how we can work together with classes classes, courses and 1:1 coaching here: https://www.feettoearthyoga.co.uk/

With love and light,

Helen xxx

Transcript

SPEAKER_00: 0:05

Welcome to Be Still and Notice, a yoga podcast. Join me, your host, yoga and meditation instructor Helen Taylor, to dive deeply into the vast ocean of wisdom that is yoga. Explore with me how these ancient practices can help heal and elevate us physically, mentally, emotionally and spiritually in an ultra-modern world. Together we'll deepen our practice, explore our connection to divinity and our own inner landscapes with the help of special guests, guided meditations, how-tos and oh so much more. Yoga has the incredible power to change your life on every level and it all begins with stillness. Now let's begin. Hi everyone and welcome to episode 8 of Be Still and Notice, a yoga podcast. In this shorter episode I'm talking about the power of silence. Silence is a really incredible tool that can help us on so many levels. And I talk a bit in this episode about my experience of a 10 day silent meditation retreat. How silence can help us in our everyday with our sense of presence, focus. We also talk about how silence has a slightly negative connotation in our society at the moment and maybe how we're talking too much and not listening enough. Anyway, I hope you enjoy this episode. Let's get cracking. the last time you were completely silent you spent some time just you alone with your thoughts not speaking not looking at the phone not watching TV but just being in silence maybe You were out in nature, enjoying the natural sounds around you, and there was no need to speak, no need to make a sound. For me, that's when silence is very powerful, that silence and that stillness. For some reason, silence has become... quite a negative or come with a negative connotation in our modern day world. But I believe silence is an extremely powerful tool to connect with ourselves inside. And I believe that silence is actually a much more natural state of being than we're led to believe or than what we're used to. Silence has a profound effect on our emotional and physical regulation. It really allows us to be confronted with ourself, ourselves, our egos, inner dialogues, our emotions, and it allows us to work through it on our own. Sometimes it can be very difficult to be in silence, to not express, but just to sit and with whatever's happening in the mind, in the body, and in the heart. But yoga teaches us that our true reality, the trueness of our inner self, the Atman, is always silent. So when we We connect to this state of being, silence, quiet, still space. We connect to that true reality within. And it can become incredibly expansive and transformative. I'm fascinated by silence. Silence. after I did a 10-day silent vipassana meditation retreat a few years ago. It did so many things for me and it is still the hardest thing I have ever done. At one stage, I went to see the meditation teacher because you're assigned someone to go and speak to because, let's face it, You're meditating from 4.30am in the morning until about 6 or 7 o'clock at night. Things are going to come up for everybody. And so you're assigned a teacher and you can choose, there are certain times when you can go and speak softly to the teacher. So that they can help you with whatever you're coming up against. And I remember saying to the teacher... I think I've developed an aversion to meditation. There were points in that retreat where I hated it. I was in tears. I was frustrated. It was absolutely fascinating. And there were really, really beautiful, profound moments as well in the stillness and in the quiet. I remember one day we were all in the meditation hall and you have all the men on one side and all the women on the other. So you're in the same space but the men and the women are on opposite sides of the hall. Some people are sat in chairs, some people are sat on the floor. The majority of people are sat on the floor on these cushions. And it was summertime and all of a sudden... storm came over and this is a big barn type of building with a metal roof and it chucked it down with rain and I remember the sound of the rain being the most glorious sound I had heard. I literally was in seventh heaven. I was like oh my god that sound. It was incredible. I'm fascinated by what happens to the mind when you strip away everything away because we know we are overstimulated. So on this retreat I had no phone, no computer, no music, no writing materials, no way to express myself, no books to read, nothing. absolutely nothing and in fact one of the main rules was you were not meant to make eye contact with anyone else on the course I have to say I cheated because I felt that was slightly inhuman and it was very reassuring on a really hard day to meet someone's eye and just have a little smile or a little look and share that feeling of yeah this is hard um Yeah, what happens to the mind when you strip away all that stimulation and that stimulus is really fascinating. To begin with, for me anyway, I can only talk from my experience. The first few days, your mind is still really quite shouty. And... For those first couple of days, I found myself talking to myself alone. I was lucky I had a room of my own. Sometimes you sleep in dorms. I talked to myself a little bit. I cheated. And then other things started to happen. I was experiencing... Quite interesting physical sensations with the meditation practice. At one point my whole body disappeared and the only thing that was there was my hands. I experienced a lot of full body buzzing, vibration, all sorts of really interesting things. But one of the most powerful things that I remember is what happened to my memory. I remember going back to like a childlike state of curiosity. Because in between being in the meditation hall, you have lots of breaks. You have meal breaks, you have breaks where you can wash your clothes. There's no washing machine, so you have to wash your clothes by hand, where we were anyway. And because it was summer and it was set in beautiful grounds with a woodland area and a nice field, everyone would just lie around on the grass in their own space and sunbathe, rest. And I found myself looking at things just like I did when I was a child. staring at the blades of grass, the little bugs, staring at flowers, with the same sense of awe and wonder. By the way, I'm very like that anyway. But this very childlike sense of curiosity and wonder just came back out of nowhere. And I loved it. I could happily have sat in that field staring at this bush with bees buzzing all over it for hours and hours and hours in that state. There's something about getting rid of the outside noise that allows all of your senses to sharpen up. I feel that they're very dulled when we're overstimulated and we're constantly looking for these dopamine hits on a phone, looking at Instagram, looking at this, looking at that. Because let's face it, we're all addicted in varying or lesser degrees to our tech. And sometimes we have to do these things for work and we have to live in the modern world. But when you experience extended period of silence like that, it really wakes you up to what's happening in your mind. I had memories coming, just arriving out of nowhere. Stuff I had completely buried, forgotten about. And I remember just... Every day going, oh, that's a beautiful memory. I'd forgotten that. Stuff from my childhood, stuff from only a few years ago. It's almost like little parts of my brain were just reawakening. Oh, here we are. I've got space to light up. And it was magical. It was really, really magical. I struggled a lot with the lack of self-expression and the lack of connection, especially when I found it really difficult on the days where I just found it really difficult and I was like, oh, I just want to speak to someone. I remember on the sixth day, you listened to daily the teachings by the guy that made Vipassana possible. brought it back to popularity in the 70s and 80s I believe. I can't remember his name at the moment which is really bad but every evening you listen to his recordings of his voice teaching about Vipassana and how it works and it's very comforting and reassuring but he says on the sixth day it's normally everyone's worst day and that was very true for me. On the sixth day, I had had enough of not saying thank you when someone passed me something in the dinner room. I'd had enough of not smiling at people. I just had this overwhelming feeling of being with all these lovely people and not being able to express myself. It was so frustrating. I nearly broke my silence. I nearly chatted to this lady. Who I talked to on the first day... And then I just took myself... Stormed off into the woods... And had a very... I had a cry... And a very strong chat with myself... And then I was okay... Then I was okay... Now you don't need to... Go on a ten day meditation retreat... To feel the benefits of silence... If that's something that you fancy doing... Please do try it. It's absolutely fascinating experience. And it gave me a wealth of self-awareness, much, much deeper sense of self-awareness, self-knowledge. And it heightens all of your senses and emotions. You have to be careful afterwards as well and they give you a day at the retreat centre to come out of your silence in the safety of that centre before you go out into the world because you become so heightened in your senses and in physical senses and in your emotional state that going back out into normal life is really quite overwhelming. I remember that day. My body felt very sensitive. I couldn't be around lots of people. The noise was really intense. So you need to treat yourself really quite gently. So silence for yourself is a fascinating, really, really powerful tool. But like I said, you can do that on a daily basis by just sitting in silence. Just taking some time to be quiet and not talk, not do. Of course, meditation is a beautiful way to practice this. But you can just sit anywhere and be silent and notice for a period of time. Notice what that does for you. I think that there is a huge amount... of emphasis put now in our society on using our voice now I am sitting here talking to you using my voice and I think the voice is amazing and it's powerful and I'm not against that let's just make that really clear now but I think there's too much emphasis on on talking and not enough emphasis on listening in our society today. And I think that's where a huge amount of division comes into play. People seem to have lost the ability to listen in discussion and conversation. So when you're listening in silence, it's very respectful. You're honouring what that other person says. is saying and you're actively listening again that's another tool to learn because quite often people are just waiting for their turn to speak but if you're actively listening that's a really really powerful way to make that other person feel seen feel heard feel honoured respected and I think that's missing So often, yeah, people are just waiting for their turn to speak, which means they're not listening. They're just eager to say what they want to say in the argument or in the discussion. And that's why people aren't learning from one another. This is partly why I love a podcast, because you're listening in silence. You're listening to another conversation. You can make up your own mind. You can honour that conversation. You can disagree with it. But you're in silence. You're listening to that. Silence can say so much more than words, can't it? You know, often... After an argument or a difficult conversation, silence can say everything. It's very, very powerful. And to be able to sit in silence with someone you have a huge connection to comfortably is a very, very beautiful, amazing thing. So Sri Ramana Maharshi, who I talked about in another episode, I went to his ashram in India, is a massive, or was a massive advocate of silence. In fact, many times he would sit with his students and just be silent. And it's written that As a guru, this satsang, this silent satsang, was a way for him to communicate more powerfully than any word what he wanted to teach people, what he wanted people to learn from his experience of enlightenment. And he found that by sitting in silence, he could communicate that in a much more pure and powerful way. And I've got his book here, which is one of his books, which is beautiful. It's called Be As You Are, The Teachings of Sri Ramana Maharshi. Again, I'll link it. And there's a little paragraph in here, which is amazing, where he describes silence. Silence is ever-speaking. It is a perennial flow of language which is interrupted by speaking. These words I am speaking obstruct that mute language. For example there is electricity flowing in a wire. With resistance to its passage it glows as a lamp or revolves as a fan. In the wire it remains as electric energy. Similarly also silence is the eternal flow of language. obstructed by words what one fails to know by conversation extending to several years can be known instantly in silence or in front of silence recently I spoke I listened to a really beautiful last week actually podcast about Again, I'll link it in. And one of the guests on the podcast was a Norwegian explorer who is famous for travelling unaided, trekking unaided to the South Pole with no radio. He was told to take a radio for safety reasons, but he took the batteries out on the plane. And alone, completely alone, completely unaided, in total silence. 50 days of total silence. And I found, I'm going to buy his book because I found it absolutely fascinating. And he talks a lot about silence being a very natural state for us as human beings. And The space it can give us mentally to work through stuff that's going on for us, to allow stuff to come to the surface, to allow us to really be able to focus and concentrate and get a lot more clarity. That's something that I noticed on my silent retreat is that I was so much more focused. Without all this noise, without my attention being drawn here, there and everywhere, my focus was just razor sharp. And my awareness of what was happening in my body, I mean, part of the passion... A major part of the practice is you scan your body. So you become very, very, very aware of what's happening in your physical body. For the first three days, you just practice anapana, which is a breath awareness, which I teach. Sometimes it's a really lovely, simple practice where you're just aware of the breath, the feeling of the breath as it enters and exits the nostrils so you become so attuned to the sensations and the skin just below the nostrils and the feeling of your breath entering it becomes your entire world so your focus your mind gets razor razor razor sharp and i believe that's why The memory does this really interesting thing, why your sense of awe and wonder and ability to just look at a flower and be completely absorbed in it. Now, when I was on my dog walk this morning, we have four beautiful doggies and a cat, but she wasn't out on the walk. Sometimes you'll hear them in the background. When I was on my dog walk this morning... I do this practice where I notice what's going on in my mind when I'm walking. And I try to be completely present and not in my mind. So you know when you're walking along and you're looking at things but you're not really seeing them. Try this practice next time you're out for a walk somewhere on your own. When you look at something... Notice if you're really looking at it with your eyes. Sounds strange, I know, but really notice. Notice if you're really looking at it and absorbing everything that you see in the moment. The colours, the textures, the shape, the way the light hits the petals. Smell the flower. Are you really noticing every minute detail about that flower? Or are you thinking about something else entirely and your eyes are literally just capturing that image? That is the difference between presence and awareness and focus. Because a lot of the time, all of us do this, you see the image, you don't actually see it. The flower. You see the image of the flower. Your internal mind is somewhere else entirely. So next time you're out, just have a look at the flower or the leaf, whatever it is. And as you look at it, notice, are you really seeing everything or are you just noticing the image? And practice that presence. A really beautiful side effect, if you will, of silence is that that happens completely naturally. So how can we practice silence on an everyday? I would say meditation is my go-to silence. Walking. And even just a couple of moments where you just sit and be still. Don't speak. Don't listen. Don't look at your phone or any other device. You can look at nature. Look at the things around you in the real world. And just be, just allow yourself to be still and notice. There we are again. It's there. That's why I named this podcast, Be Still and Notice, because it's everything. Be still and notice. Notice the texture of that flower. Notice everything. Shape of every petal. Notice, notice, notice. Because that is our reality. That is where the stillness, the sense of clarity, calm, focus and presence begins. And it can literally transform your life the more you practice state of presence and awareness. So my friends, maybe this has helped you think differently about silence and we'll be talking more about it in other episodes and I'll be sure to link everything in the show notes if you're interested and want to learn a little bit more. And until next time, wishing you a beautiful and peaceful day. day ahead thank you so much for listening to the be still and notice podcast i really hope you enjoyed this episode and perhaps it even added something to your life if you know someone that might benefit please share this episode with them and of course a review would be so much appreciated Please find all the information relating to this episode, including relevant links in the show notes. And until next time, sending you so much love and light on your path to yoga.