4 Steps to Silence

4 steps to silence.

Irrespective of what John Gray says, most human beings seem determined to fill the gaps in those quiet moments at all costs. We tend to feel awkward when things go quiet, so we say something or do something to close down the silence and resurrect noise. Any noise it seems is better than no noise. But this needs to be an external noise which is more a distraction from our own internal noise.

For silence does not happen when we stop speaking, or when we go indoors, or when we switch of our TVs, laptops or mobiles. Our desperate drive for noise is really a fleeing from our own thoughts, and silence can only happen once we learn to detach from our own thinking.

This has personal relevance for me. I have just returned from a 9-day tantra teacher training retreat where I had my first out-of-mind blissful experience. I have previously had ‘peak experiences’, ecstatic moments and what some might call awakening moments. But never previously an out-of-mind blissfulness that connected the body to the divine, that shifted from worldly pleasure to infinite pleasure in the classical tantra sense.

So, how did I reach this state?

To me, I think there were four overarching steps.

1.     Raised ‘self-awareness’ through self-reflection of our thoughts, emotions and behaviour (self-awareness has two key elements, awareness of our thoughts - which is called metacognition - and awareness of our emotions - which is known as meta-mood). During the 9-day tantra retreat I had plenty of time to immerse myself in an extended period of spiritual enquiry, and especially noticing my ‘process’ and how this played out in the here and now, in the real world.

Spiritual enquiry is not otherworldly. It is very much dealing with your ‘stuff’ or your ‘shit’ in the here and now. The baggage we carry around, our personalities, our identities, our ego, our socialisation and internalisation, and how we dis-identify with all of this. For once we can start to dis-identify, even slightly, we can start to recognise our thoughts and emotions as something we have and not something we are.

2.     We can then begin the process of ‘acceptance’ of who we are, recognising the impossibility of intentionally shutting down our thoughts and emotions. This in itself can be difficult as we have a tendency to live in ‘denial’ about our true self due, in part, to our socialisation process: we are all conditioned through the socialisation process which lead us to view things in certain ways.

To begin to see things in different ways we require some form of (internal or external) intervention, but this intervention needs to have sufficient ‘weight’ and meaning for it to lead to sustainable change. This process is often referred to as ‘deconditioning’.

Spiritual enquiry, tantra practices, and meditation all have a part to play. As does the mind. Our brains are hard wired in such a way that ensures we are either people or task orientated. This means we will, by ‘default’ make more use of a network of brain areas connecting the midline (around the dorsal and ventromedial) if we are people orientated, or make more use of the dorsal and ventral attention systems if we are task orientated.

What is important to note is that the use of either of these suppresses the other. And within the brain, the strength of either will depend on how often it is used. So if we naturally use one in favour of the other this will become stronger and stronger, while the other becomes weaker and weaker. In order to counter this process, we need to take the time to reconnect with our ‘other’ side through repetitive use, thereby becoming more fully who we are.

This reconnection allows for an interplay that brings out our creative energies; shakti, the core of our Being. A harmony that allows us to connect to the divine

3.     From this perspective we are them able to give ‘focused attention’ through repetition (so rather than running away from our thoughts and emotions, we give them the attention they deserve). This can be very daunting, especially if the emotions are viewed as strongly negative. However, it might be worth reminding ourselves at this point, tantra is about embracing all aspects of who we are, the good and the bad, what are perceived as the positive and the negative.

This has special significance for me right now. My beautiful dog, Mona, has just passed away. I am heartbroken. But rather than work harder, or drink, or take some drugs, or find some other distraction, I have learnt to sit with this emotion, to meditate on it, and as a consequence come to realise the beauty of the emotion itself. The gift of being able to hold this emotion, and the gift Mona offered me of giving unconditional love for the first time in my life.

So, giving focused attention allowed me to experience a great sense of gratitude and peace, where I offered focused attention to the beautiful ritual we were going through as a form of devotion and surrender to the divine, on the night of my blissful experience

4.     This opened me up to finding the door to my ‘inner being’ or as Colin Wilson describes it, taking on a birds-eye view rather than a worms-eye view (this is equivalent to what Maslow notes as self-actualising through taking on the ‘flow’ or ‘immersion’). Stepping out of my mind and into the universe within.

Bringing it all together

Silence, like tantra, is about amassing greater self-awareness to truly accept who we are, as a stepping-stone to self-detachment on the larger journey towards self-transcendence.

As John Gray put it;

“if we turn outside yourself – to the birds and animals and the quickly changing places where they live – you may hear something beyond words. Even humans can find silence, if they can bring themselves to forget the silence they are looking for.”

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Email me direct if you are interested in mindful, trauma-informed, intimacy or spiritual coaching, or if you would like to join my new Pink Tantra Towards Awakening group for chat rooms, video channels and in-person workshops around tantra and intimacy practices robert.pinktantra@gmail.com

See my personal development / personality profiling book DISCover the Power of You published through John Hunt Publishing Ltd, 2017. ISBN: 978-1-78535-591-2

And for a bit of light reading, see my first historical fictional novel Fermented Spirits published through Austin Macauley Publishers, 2022. ISBN-13: ‎978-1398437159