#015 – An ode to silence

Finding respite from our noisy lives.

Go deep into the silence.

Absorb it.

Let it scare you.

Let it reshape you and expand your awareness.

(Pythagoras, quoted in Zorn and Marz)

It’s been a while between posts. Life has been hectic – work, family holidays, meditation teacher training, parenting, gardening, laundry. The list goes on. I wouldn’t characterise life as busy – since I actively work to not fire on all cylinders, all the time - but I have felt like this period in life has come with a little bit of stimulus overload.

Which has me thinking about quiet, and silence more specifically.

Can you remember the last time you enjoyed deep silence?

Indulge me – close your eyes for a few seconds and try to remember.

I can’t pinpoint a specific time – it is more of a feeling. I can feel the sun on my face, I can feel the pulse, the vibration of the trees. I am outside and I am deeply breathing in cool, crisp air. Recalling this now, I have no idea if this memory is real or not, but it is how I imagine deep silence.

I am writing this in a busy café on Saturday morning. I can hear the clatter of saucers as they are placed by the coffee machine, the tap of the milk jug on the bench, and the varying timbre of conversations near and far. There are people talking on the phone for long periods of time (despite sitting with another human!!). It’s noisy. But no one is looking for my attention, so the noise isn’t overwhelming. It’s like the tap of my keyboard and the gentle knock of my coffee cup as it hits the table are part of the café’s soundscape, it drops and washes over me.

In contrast, after working from home all day on Tuesday this week, it was 6pm, we were sat around the dinner table and my 3 children were all itching to tell me about their days, ‘mum, mum, MUM!’.

It was noisy.

Demanding of my attention, here and now. All encompassing. I thought to myself that I was glad that I had worked from home that day, so I wasn’t overwhelmed (too much) by all of the sound and attention.

As I get older I have found that I am less comfortable in noisy, demanding environments. The stimulus is too much and I crave quiet and simplicity. I suspect this a product of a few things – having many small children, more environmental noise in general, and the overwhelming flow of informational noise, available at our finger tips at a moment’s notice.

Over the past few weeks I have been thinking a lot about internal noise – the internal chatter in our minds – versus the external noise, the noise in our environments. It seems to me that both have become increasingly louder.

Meditation teacher training has had me reflecting a lot on internal noise and how through practicing meditation we seek to quieten the voice, and turn down the volume.

Until I started a regular meditation practice, I had quite a noisy internal voice. It wasn’t necessarily a critical voice – but I would often either rehearse or replay conversations, try to solve problems with mental arithmetic, have songs on loop, and the list goes on. My internal world was noisy. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but once you start to notice the constant internal chatter, most of us think about how nice some silence would be once and a while.

In the excellent book by Justin Zorn and Leigh Marz’s Golden: The Power of Silence in a World Full of Noise they point to research that shows that our internal chatter - whether positive, negative, or indifferent, all has something in common – “It is high velocity and high volume.”

As one researcher describes it “the voice in your head is a very fast talker… ‘inner speech’ is condensed to a rate of about four thousand words per minute – 10 times the speed of expressed speech – which means most of us in modern times have to listen to 320 State of the Union addresses worth of internal monologue on any given day.”

How exhausting!

Developing a regular meditation practice is one way to find pockets of deep silence.

For most people, our first experience of meditation is ‘guided’ – you are listening to a voice (often through your phone), telling you want to do. For me, this technique is still a little too noisy.

Other techniques, like Zen meditation have you sit austerely, back straight, focusing on your breath as a means to quell the mental chatter.

My personal favourite is using mantras, where you quietly and internally repeat a word or series of words that help to quieten the mind. Using mantras can make a big difference, especially if you have trouble using other techniques – like concentrating on your breath or focussing on another sensation For me, I can achieve pockets of deep silence practicing this way – and it astounds me every time.

Research has found mantra meditation can improve wellbeing, reduce anxiety, and improve memory. This form of meditation can help synchronise the left and right sides of the brain and promote relaxing (alpha) brain waves. This synchronisation may help to improve brain function over time and possibly slow cognitive decline.

Practicing meditation has helped me to thrive amidst all of the other noise in my life.

But some people equate silence and stillness with boredom – and are deeply uncomfortable by the prospect of quiet.

“All of humanity's problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone,” said French philosopher and mathematician Blaise Pascal in the mid-17th century.

In an experiment, published in 2014, each of 55 participants was seated alone in a quiet, empty room with nothing to do—except they had access to a button that would deliver an electric shock to their ankle which they had previously described as “unpleasant.” In their 15 minutes of solitude, 67 per cent of the men and 25 per cent of the women chose to shock themselves instead of simply sitting quietly.

We (and the children of today!) need to learn to be alone with our thoughts, without distraction.

Externally, our worlds are getting louder (and more distracting – see Well, Well post #006 on attending to our attention). After the COVID lockdowns, noise is scaling up again and our environments are noisier than ever before. More cars on the road, more planes in the sky, more construction noise everywhere, more open plan offices (public service, I’m looking at you!), more phone notifications (turn them off please!). The list goes on.

In 2011, the World Health Organization estimated that one million healthy life years were lost from traffic-related noise in the western part of Europe alone. An survey in 2018 found as many as 95 per cent of Australians felt affected by a bombardment of noise every day in their home.

Thinking about it from an economic perspective – it’s no wonder that we don’t talk much about the lack of silence in our lives and the mental health implications of noise pollution.

It’s because we price silence at zero.

Silence doesn’t contribute to GDP, it doesn’t make money. Trucks and cars on the road make money. Planes in the air make money. The ping on our iPhone makes money. Silence doesn’t. We need to measure what matters – how do we as individuals and as a society prioritise the value of silence?

I don’t have an easy solution to this problem (perhaps my mental chatter will sort it out for me one day while I am pulling out weeds in the garden), but talking to your friends and colleagues about the power of silence is a great start!

How can we reduce the noise in our lives?

In Golden: The Power of Silence in a World Full of Noise Zorn and Marz propose we remedy the onslaught of noise in our lives in 3 ways:

1. Pay attention to the diverse forms of auditory, informational and internal interference that arise in your life. Study how to navigate them.

2. Perceive the small pockets of peace that live amidst all the sounds and stimuli. Seek these spaces. Savour them. Go as deeply into the silence as you possibly can, even when its only present for a few seconds.

3. Cultivate spaces of profound silence – even rapturous silence – from time to time.

Be well – and wishing you pockets of silence this week.

Alicia