I’m not supposed to be writing this. I’m at a silent retreat and even writing to myself is forbidden. Now, every whisper on the page is a broken vow, a crack in my facade of serenity.
When I signed up for this five-day retreat, I expected it to be easy-ish. How hard could it be to be quiet, enjoy solitude, healthy vegetarian eating and yoga? Five days of silence. No phone, no internet, no chattering chorus of social media. Just me, the mountains, and my thoughts. Easy peasy.
I’m looking for more peace, a retreat from the relentless symphony of busy, modern life. I didn’t expect that my thoughts would be a deafening hum or that I’d have to give up my daily journaling habit. But here we are.
When I asked what I should do instead of journaling, the teacher said, “Why do you need something to do? Try to just sit with yourself.” I’m not even sure what that means, I said. She suggested walking among the trees. “Be with nature, not just in it.” Okay, I sigh under my breath. The process, however, will be gradual; I’m still technically allowed my journal today. But tomorrow, well, tomorrow, I’ll be alone, without even myself to talk to, apparently.
The Silent Retreat Center
The silent retreat center is in the Blue Ridge Mountains. It includes a dozen places over hundreds of acres to meditate, practice yoga, eat and sleep. At the bottom of a hill, my room has three twin beds, though I paid extra to have the other two empty. It is otherwise sparse, with white walls, a small wooden desk, and one nightstand: no art or décor. I must traverse the incline to reach my classes and most activities, including the dining hall. There is a shuttle, but in for a penny, in for a pound, I figure.
“I am in Silence” Just not yet
At the hall, dozens of other people congregate for dinner. They are here for various retreats; only 12 others will be silent like me and we wear tags that say, “I am in silence.” There are also basic questions on the back of the tags like, “Where’s the bathroom?” that I can point to instead of asking. I won’t even be able to say please, thank you, or sing to myself.
I catch snippets of conversations as I look for a place to sit with my quinoa and roasted vegetables. These people are here with friends and groups, planning a week of enjoyment untainted by fear. The thought of fear jars me. Why am I afraid of silence?
Until now, I only thought of this silent retreat as other people being unable to communicate with me. No social media, no news, no request for my time. Oddly, it didn’t occur to me that it would include my communication too. Who am I without words? What am I?
I pick a small table beyond the floor-to-ceiling windows on the balcony in the far corner, away from the chatter. Soon, I will become mute while they continue talking, reading, writing, and scrolling through their phones. I try to muster a superior attitude, but I only manage to chew aggressively and scowl. I redirect my focus toward the sight in front of me—the Blue Ridge Mountains in their various shades of blue on blue on blue.
Day 1: Apprehension
During my first class, the sense of fear lingers. I came to this retreat because I needed to feel something, but I didn’t expect it to be dread. I’ve been practicing meditation for four years, but it has stopped feeling as helpful as it once had. My focus was slippery, purpose waning, and ambition ebbing. I needed a jolt in the arm.
Several cabins pepper the landscape on either side of many sets of stairs. Inside one, a dozen of us sit on mats next to big open windows. Birds sing their evening song as the sun takes a bow. We talk about why we came here, our experiences with silence and what we hope to learn. Most people have a specific issue they’re dealing with, like grief, addiction, depression, relationship trouble and the like, but that is not what they say. We all say we seek peace, a clearer mind, and easier meditation.
As the teacher guides us, we close our eyes and focus on the blank space. The collective energy of being with other seekers who want to improve feels good. I am surprised to learn we meditate twice as long as I’d thought. It was good to slip away, but the feeling is short lived because now she wants to practice breath exercises.
I’ve always hated controlled breathing exercises. “No breath, no life,” she smiles. Years of untreated asthma meant I could never master them, and I don’t like things I can’t master. I commit to doing a good job, the best possible job. I make it to the end without getting frustrated. Already, I’m making progress, right?
Day 2: Irritation: Why is silence so slow?
We start each day at sunrise and end it at sunset. While trying to be “with nature,” I walk up the steep hill to yoga class when two deer leap across my path and nearly trample me. “Gah!” I shout at the pine trees where the would-be murderers disappear. The trees respond by emitting pine fragrance. “Some help you are,” I say out loud, just to use my voice while I still can.
As I approach the classroom, the sun hits the top of a tall window, the birds nearby welcome me and the mountain breeze escorts me in. I settle onto my mat. The yoga I typically practice is fast and intended to build strength and burn calories. This yoga is slow and methodical, testing my patience. I am ridged and pain filled. The teacher, who is as limber as a cooked spaghetti noodle, says to ignore the difficulty, but in my brittleness I close my eyes and ignore her instead.
Today, we are supposed to forgo our “distractions.” I have already put my phone away, and I watch others with envy and judgment in the dining hall as they scroll while I eat a tofu scramble and fresh fruit. “I aim for perfection,” I jot in my notebook and glare. Later, we’ll move into total silence, and only the teacher will talk.
Meditation
In class, I try to meditate, to find solace in the emptiness, but my mind is a butterfly, flitting from thought to thought. Memories dance in the kaleidoscope of my closed eyelids; waiting worries cast long shadows in the corners of my mind. The silence is overflowing.
The teacher says meditation is not perfect blankness; it is our mind’s way of cleansing and training. It cycles through the thoughts and organizes them, deleting, filing, or holding them for later. “Think of your mind as a broom sweeping needless thoughts away.” I mentally roll my eyes and sweep her away.
The teacher shows us how different ways of breathing can enhance energy, calm, or bring focus. I’ve never thought of breath as more than sustaining life. You can live an entire life with shallow, meaningless breaths or put the breath to work. Most of my breaths are huffs. This new breathing is physically uncomfortable, but I like the idea of getting added value from it and vow to try harder.
Day 3: Transformation is a Labyrinth
In my free time, I find a labyrinth in the middle of the hill. It is a large circle of circles etched into the earth just wide enough for one person to walk. I enter its circular pathway and try to make sense of its curves, anticipating the end and wondering how long it will take. But the path loops back on itself too many times for me to comprehend. Eventually, I must give up figuring it out and accept that it is taking me where I need to go. In the center of the circle, I find a stone the size of a cantaloupe secretly embedded in the ground. I kneel, touch it, take an intentional breath, and turn around.
In the quiet of the third day, I find something else—not peace or enlightenment but a willful acceptance. My mind begins to transform the chatter, anxiety, and relentless storytelling of my inner world into ether. I start to understand that silence is not the absence of sound but the space between the notes, the canvas beneath the brushstrokes. It is what comes before and after. It is always there. Silence is the constant, interrupted.
Silent Retreat Levels of Silence
As we progress in silence, we’re instructed to avoid looking at faces. Time ticks by without end. When I am in class or eating, I have something to mark time, but when I am walking in the trees or staring at clouds, it is formless. I look at my watch again and again, anticipating the next thing to do. Why doesn’t “being with nature” seem like enough?
At lunch, the chatter around me is jarring. I take a bite of roasted sweet potato, inhale and exhale repeatedly. I’d thought hearing voices in the dining hall would make me jealous, but nothing they said seemed worth saying. If I had words to use, I wouldn’t waste them.
Day 4: Observations Previously Unimportant
With shapeless time on my hands, I head into the trees and find a trail below the balcony leading into the woods. With each step, the chatter of voices softens, then, like the wind, disappears. Being silent makes me crave quiet, too. I navigate tree roots and rocks on a steep incline, seeking something I cannot yet define.
The trees have many things to say. As the wind pushes past their leaves, they rustle to grab my attention. I see them waving and hear their creaking murmur. The bark, leaves, size and shape of each are unique. There is one trunk so deeply grooved I can put my fingers into it. Does the tree feel me touch it? I lay in the moss and marveled at their flexibility. They bow and bend with more agility than I imagined, neither hard nor brittle.
As I lay here, I see things that were barely a blur before and I assumed were not worth noticing.
Nature is as much a cacophony as the city, composed of different instruments. Wind tells secrets through the pines, birds tap code on hollow logs, and the distant gurgle of water is a lullaby. How long will it take to hear flower petals opening and butterflies emerge from cocoons?
When I glance at my watch I jump up and rush so I am not late to class.
We Process People, Places and Things Differently without Words
Though I sit next to and meditate for long periods with the same 11 people all day, we cannot know each other in traditional ways. Instead, through glances, I am learning what they eat, how they move, and the tone of their breathing. I see the clothes they wear and the posture of their bodies. Without words, writing, reading or music, the symbols of who we are have been removed. Instead, I feel their energy. I know without words who is thriving and who is struggling. I know so much more about them than if we had the mask of words.
At night, I lay in my small bed with strange, fitful dreams. During class today, the teacher, as she often does, answered unspoken questions. She says strange dreams are a good sign that our minds are purging. We are filtering leftover memories and unresolved thoughts. Our brains are straining through the odds and ends we didn’t get to in our active meditations. She says, “The state of your mind determines the quality of your life.”
In the morning, I trudge up the hill to watch the sunrise. There is so much mist and cloud that I barely notice the orange glow emerging. It rises imperceptibly, changing everything around it by inches almost unnoticeably.
Day 5: How to Benefit from Silence: Relinquish
I lie on a nearby bench in the woods and stare at the clouds. One giant white cloud melds into smaller ones again and again. The world is shifting while I stay still. I hear people walk by and I don’t even turn my head to look.
Maybe silence is resetting my brain’s need for constant, immediate action and useless data. At this moment, it doesn’t matter to me what those people look like or how many there are, so there’s no need to distract from the shapeshifting cloud.
Learning the Evolution of Meditation
When I first began meditating, I hoped and aimed for an empty mind and my failure was a misery. Now, I know you can never have an entirely clear mind except for the briefest moments. Meditation is a practice of pausing and slowing.
When I return to the labyrinth, getting lost again in its spirals, I think less about its end or much else. Inside its circle, I can only put one foot in front of the other. It is me, the moss, the clover, and the wind. After three days of total silence, I feel more a part of the elements around me and it feels as if I’ve found something I didn’t know I’d been missing.
After we come out of silence, there are loud sighs and exclamations, “Whew!” and “What a relief!” For me, it is a relief and a sadness. I’m afraid. My teacher says I will lose the peace I have gained because as we rejoin the world, common distractions like phones, work, and family will make our lives and minds full again. Through continued daily practice, she says, we will remember that silence isn’t found outside us but within. Even in chaos, we can have inner calm through breath and connection to the elements of our world. That is the truth of silence that we must take with us.
Emerging from Silence: Is a Silent Retreat Worth it?
Instead of heading straight home, I rent a cabin in the Great Smoky Mountains. The early morning light nudges the clouds as rain falls on green leaves outside my window. Two days have passed since I’ve rejoined the world. I’ve realized that part of silence is understanding what we let consume our time and minds. Now I have an empty mind, a clean slate, I must decide and be selective in what I allow in.
Each lesson builds on the one before. Through silence, I have taken one step forward and learned new ways to connect with myself and disconnect with the frivolous. We can’t just become silent, “enlightened,” “meditator,” or anything else. It takes practice. We must try different methods and techniques and make new attempts. In this way, we learn, grow and become better over time.
Five days may not be enough to tame the wild symphony within that is always restarting, but it’s a part of the journey. The silent retreat, learning to be in silence, has caused a crack in the dam, a seed pushing through the hard-packed earth.
Now, I sit on a covered patio, exploring how raindrops caress leaves and plump the earth. Because I am so quiet and still, a little sparrow perches on the rail inches from me. It dances a little jig with wet, ruffled feathers and sings a song of good tidings. May my inner silence be as persistent as the rising sun.
Read about other experiences and things I’ve tried to make a deeper connection.
