Silence
Recollecting Ourselves
“I can’t meditate,” said my friend. “My mind just goes wild when I sit down with nothing to do.” He is a deeply prayerful person. I asked him if he was aware that his mind was zooming as it happened. He said that part of the time he was. I shared with him that I thought those were meditative moments because he was aware of what was happening. They just weren’t pleasant moments.
As western culture has appropriated the word “Zen,” we’ve created misunderstanding about what it means. When decor is referred to as Zen, it means clean, minimalist, and uncluttered. When we refer to a person being in Zen state, we often mean something like calm or blissful. While these connotations do reflect aspects of Zen practice, they miss the point.
Zen is a set of meditative practices aimed at developing a state of one-pointed concentration in which we can gain insight and clarity about our true nature. Zen practice also helps the practitioner to express their true nature with authenticity and compassion in order to be of benefit to others. To gain clarity about our true nature, we must start where we are, which for most of us means starting with a busy mind.
The Mud of Thinking
There is a popular misconception that meditation means we sit down, turn off our thinking, and enter some pleasant state of being. This is an unfortunate idea, because it keeps us from really understanding, working with, and training our minds.
In the Sutra on the Four Establishments of Mindfulness, the Buddha taught his followers to cultivate mindfulness of their breath and body, their feelings, their thoughts, and the objects of their thoughts. If we become mindful of all of these things, we can dwell in mindfulness.
But in the sutra, the Buddha is clear that the starting point is not some perfect and pleasant state of stillness. In the section where he is discussing mindfulness of thoughts, he offers the following words about a practitioner’s experience as examples of mindfulness.
When his mind is collected, he is aware, ‘My mind is collected.’ When his mind is not collected, he is aware, ‘My mind is not collected.’ When his mind is distracted, he is aware, ‘My mind is distracted.’ When his mind is not distracted, he is aware, ‘My mind is not distracted.’
— Sutra on the Four Establishments of Mindfulness
The Buddha did not describe mindfulness as never having a distracted mind, but as knowing when our minds are distracted. Whatever is going on in our body, feelings, minds, or world can be the fertile mud from which stillness, peace, and silence can grow.
The Seed of Awareness
The starting point to develop silence is simply to be aware of what is going on with our bodies, mouths, and minds. Silence is both an external and an internal practice. To be externally silent, we still our body and cease speaking. This has its challenges, but most people can become externally silent for at least a few minutes. To be internally silent, we still and quiet our minds. For most people, stilling and quieting the mind is a significantly more challenging experience than stilling the body and refraining from speaking.
Awareness is the key to developing a mind that is still and quiet. When we are aware of something, we know that it is happening, but we are not enmeshed in it. With awareness, there is space between our experience and our mental state. When awareness is lost, we become bound to our mental state and lose our freedom.
The experience of being angry is a very good example of how quickly we can become enmeshed in thoughts and feelings. For most people, anger arrives with a great upwelling of emotional energy that overwhelms our minds. When this happens, we become bound to the anger and the narrative associated with it and we may act in ways that we later regret.
If we cultivate awareness, we will begin to experience spaciousness around mental formations. We will realize that they arise as part of us, but they are not all of us. When we enlarge the scope of our mind via awareness, this liberates us from being enmeshed and imprisoned within our mental processes. This release is akin to lowering the volume associated with our mental formations. Because there is some space around them, we experience them in a less “noisy” way. We come to understand that awareness is the seed from which we can cultivate silence.
The Blooming of Silence
As our awareness increases, the loops of thinking that keep the mind spinning begin to grow less tight. We recollect ourselves and reclaim our wholeness by bringing our breath, body, and mind together. We start to relax, and concentration develops.
With concentration, we begin to listen, not with our physical ears, but with “the ear of our heart.”1 Brother David Steindl-Rast says that to “take something to heart” means to enter its depths and discern what it means to us. This discernment occurs beyond words and concepts. It is an experience that cannot be described, only lived. We encounter the depth of our life in this listening which announces the arrival of silence.
Cultivating Awareness
The cultivation of awareness and deep listening is not complex. We use everything at hand as objects of awareness. This includes our breath, our bodies, our feelings, our thoughts, and the objects about which we think. We seek to drop our tight mental narratives about these things and come to know them as they are in the moment, impermanent and always changing.
Thich Nhat Hanh says, “We don’t need to control our body, mind, and breath. We can just be there for them. We allow them to be themselves. This is nonviolence”2
Here are basic instructions for cultivating awareness.
FInd a quiet place, stop what you are doing, and sit down.
Assume an upright but relaxed posture with your spine straight but not rigid, your shoulders relaxed, and your head level. If you are in a chair, place both feet on the floor.
Try to sit on your sit bones so you can allow the body to release tension downward while maintaining an upright posture.
Become aware of your breath. When you are breathing in, know that you are breathing in. When you are breathing out, know you are breathing out. You can gently repeat the words “In. Out.” as you breath.
Follow your breath in this way, remaining aware of your in-breath and out-breath.
Your mind will eventually wander. When it does and you have become aware that this has happened, gently note it without irritation or judgement (this is what minds do!) and return to your breath.
This is the practice. If you are new to meditation, you can start with 5-10 mins once or twice a day. Build up the time you are siting to 20-30 minutes (or more) in a session. Remember that thoughts will arise, and that this is OK. If we practice developing awareness around them, the rest of the process will take care of itself. The practice should be pleasant and not a struggle. A wonderful resource to expand upon this practice is Thich Nhat Hanh’s translation and commentary of the Sutra on the Full Awareness of Breathing.3
Practicing with a community of others on the path is very helpful in developing meditative stability and silence. If this interests you, please consider joining us at Living Christ Sangha. We are an interfaith sangha that practices in the Plum Village tradition of Thich Nhat Hanh. Our meeting times are available at the link above. There is also a listing of worldwide sanghas practicing in the Plum Village tradition at https://plumline.org.
The first line in the Prologue of the Rule of St. Benedict is “Listen carefully, my son, to the master’s instructions, and attend to them with the ear of your heart.” (Translation by Timothy Fry, OSB)
Thich Nhat Hanh, How to Sit, p. 13
Thich Nhat Hanh, Breath, You Are Alive!