Silence shows the way..

When there is no way!

I’ve just come back from two night silent retreat.

There was nineteen of us, gathered including us as facilitators with Marion, Martin, Jan and I.

We did very little in the way of observable behaviours that I could describe but what was gained is harder to describe, and I’m going to try anyway.

There is a temporary labyrinth at this retreat, built by Martin, which I’ve walked many times and is often a highlight from the retreat.

The labyrinth seems to have its own distinct wisdom that unpacks whatever you bring to it. A question, a thought, a problem, a puzzle.

For me it was questions I’d been carrying, things I hadn’t quite resolved, tensions I’d been circling, started answering themselves. However this didn’t happen slowly, it happened with a speed and depth that surprised me.

An example of this was I was seeking clarity on something. I had been looking for a way, a path that someone or something could show me, a route a way through some challenges.

I want to know the way.

What came back instantly was simple and a little disorienting.

I Am the way.

A single statement that made it crystal clear there is no pre-carved path waiting to be found.

I am the path, I create it by walking it. The clarity I was looking for was never somewhere outside me, it was mine to generate, mine to trust.

That is the kind of thing that sounds obvious written down. In the silence of a labyrinth, it’s embodied, not just a thought. That is the difference.

I also noticed, as the noise fell away, how trivial so many of my daily preoccupations actually are.

Sitting outside, listening to birds, breathing, noticing that I have health and relationships and a life of genuine richness, these things stopped being disconnected things and becoming experiences of life.

We can think and talk about gratitude and feel nothing. When the mind stops filling itself with problems to solve, something else gets a chance to register and deepen.

I came home yesterday to my family and the things that would normally catch in me, the small irritations, the why-can’t-they, the they-should-be-doing-that, most of them just didn’t show up.

I hadn’t suppressed anything. I could simply see them for what they were, people doing them, and that being okay.

Some of the things I’d framed as problems before I left had simply stopped being problems.

They hadn’t been solved, I’d just felt my way into a different relationship with them, and from there they dissolved back into life.

Others that had felt insurmountable became smaller. A few I recognised weren’t mine to solve at all, they were asking me to trust that life has a way of pulling itself back into balance, if I get out of its way.

I am not saying retreat is the only route to this. But I am saying that the world is getting louder, and more and more people I speak to are yearning for something like this, not just a holiday, not just time off, but real silence. The kind where your innate wisdom finally gets heard.

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Earl Talbot is a guide for founders and leaders navigating the gap between who they’ve been and who they need to become. He works through Recoded Resilience and the Inner Compass framework for SOULpreneurs under Creative Muscle Ltd.