SILENCIUM ARTIFEX 3: SLIPPING INTO THE WORLD

It has been 2 1/2 years since I began this project, and I have not made any more blog posts. Even I, over-achiever extraordinaire, must confess that all the plans for weekly 5 hour sessions were too ambitious!
But I have made progress behind the scenes. Silence is an ongoing interest, and it has grown into something like a value or an ethic. This is particularly ironic because I am often chatting, whistling, playing guitar and singing. Generally I am a noisemaker-so it is curious to me why I am so drawn to silence. Save that for another post.

I attended a yin yoga class this week that was conducted in silence. After a short introduction, the teacher stopped giving verbal postural cues. Instead she asked us to look to her when she rang the bell. Each pose was held for five minutes and then the bells would ring and I would need to open my eyes to look at the teacher's pose. At first this was disrupting my meditative flow because I couldn't keep my eyes closed as I normally would.
But at some point I had a major personal insight spring forth like a frog leaping into a pond. I was laying in reclined cobblers pose, stretching my hips and inner thighs, when I suddenly realized the significance of a dream that was puzzling me a few days before. It came to me in a flash, a complete and ancient knowledge. Once I understood the meaning of the dream, I began to cry. I wept silently in that class, tears streaming into my ears, allowing negative feelings to wash over me while I bravely held the pose. I was reminded of that wonderful poem The Guest House by Rumi and I gave myself attention and support, just allowing whatever this mysterious feeling was to happen. At the end I was spent and cleansed.
This deep and incredible experience perhaps only happened because that teacher was brave enough to take the intervening medium of language away from the kinaesthetic experience. It took me out the mind I live in everyday, and introduced another sort of mind.

Silence as a skill and space for connection

I am coming to understand that silence can make us feel whole by connecting us to parts of ourselves we may be unwittingly trying to ignore, as it did for me in that yoga class. Maybe silence is the auditory equivalent of space, where we can swing our arms around and not worry to hit someone else, or not have to put on any appearances.We can take a really deep breath and not need to suck in our gut. It gives us time and space to tune into ourselves.

I am also coming to believe that silence can help connect to other people as well.  In relationships, it slows processes, creating a liminal place where relationships can unfold.   It allows for a sense of "holding space", where a person can be compassionate and fully present to others, aware of what is happening on multiple levels: physical, emotional, energetic, and intellectual. It is where wonder and creativity can surface. It is also the space where we can sit in what Jon Kabat Zinn called the "full catastrophe" of living, the full meaning and feeling of it, regardless of what is judged to be good or bad.

There are places and relationships where I can naturally slip into this role of making space, and those friends that I can sit with in comfortable silence, enjoying our togetherness.  I feel nurtured, calm and energized around these friends, where we have given one another a kind of permission to be vulnerable.

But in most of my life and with most people I am terrible at "holding space".  I often jump in when they have shared, to try and fix their problems or I get overly involved in their lives. I feel so focussed on them that I forget myself, and I just react to the emotions rising in me. I chatter away to keep them entertained and to actually prevent this sort of nurturing silence. All this has the effect of what my husband calls "steamrolling" another person: rather than meeting them where they are steamrolling takes over their experience of it and crushes their reality underfoot. Ironically it is my attempt to connect with others that drives me to jump in and try and fix their problems, yet it drives them away.

Remembering silence can help me with this problem. It is a social skill to maintain inner calm while acknowledging one's own emotions, and it is something I can learn. I can maintain appropriate boundaries to be open with others emotions and experiences, not need to change anything. The goal would be to maintain a sort of Buddhist mind within the relationship, rather than just saving it for meditation.

While a rising swell of emotion normally corresponds with a verbal act of interjecting, in this new mindset I would be able to hold my tongue, hold my thoughts, make my body a container for all that energy without using my mouth as a steam-valve.

Silence helps us reconnect to nature. Krista Tippett's wonderful interview with Gordon Hempton explores the idea of silence as an endangered space in the world and what this means for us as a species. Silent spaces are disappearing at an alarming rate and Mr. Hempton is recording them in their auditory glory. His interview explores the world as an "Solar-Powered Jukebox", one that spontaneously creates symphonies of melodious sounds, from brilliant bird songs to windy rustlings, to ecstatic sunrises. By listening openly we learn to pay attention, and this paying attention is the very state of being that brings meaning into our lives. Krista Tippet's On Being also interviewed the great cellist Yo-Yo Ma, who talks about the silence in between the notes is what makes the music, not the notes themselves. I didn't understand this concept until he described it so eloquently.

My lesson this post:

So my take-away this session is this: Rather than trying to fill the spaces with sound with others (my mindless habit of chatter or noise), perhaps I can find the courage to just be present with whatever comes. How can I introduce more silence in the world as a means to holding the space in my relationships and life in general? How can I make appropriate boundaries and witness with compassion my inner and outer world?

life is my mat: yin yoga

Dear Yin Yoga, you saved me from myself. My any inner turmoil I used to bear in daily life is dissipated when I take time to commune with you. Much of my happiness in my life is because of yoga,  especially what it gives me off the mat. Without you I am not always a very loving or patient person. Because of you I am learning how to let go of my fears and live bravely, as well as be compassionate, loving and honest with myself.
Thank you for this gift.

Lessons off the mat.

1. Yin teaches me patience and courage

Yin is a passive form of yoga that focuses on meditative states while holding postures; it calms the nervous system, opens the fascia in the body rather than the muscles, and develops the yin (feminine, receptive, soft, internal) energy and mind-set. This mind-training is like meditation, while the body is held in one posture (and postures are held for long holds, often 3-5 minutes) the aim is to experience it fully, focus on the present and the breath, and not run away from discomfort. In this way it teaches me patience, courage and solidity. Even the seemingly easiest poses become difficult both physically and mentally and yet yin provides a means to deal with this discomfort.

2. Yin yoga makes me happy and somehow stretches time

When I was balancing a full-time job in publishing with completing my masters degree, the weeks I engaged in a regular yoga practice seemed to have more hours in them than those weeks that I didn't. I was certainly happier and calmer, but it also strangely warped time to make more time in my life to do everything I wanted-play guitar, volunteer, read, play board games, cook, work and do research and write papers... whatever. This was some magical power that yoga, especially yin, seemed to have. I have read that our "inner chronometry", our experience of time, is elastic-and it warps depending on our activities, age, our emotional state, our memories and our experiences.
My theory is that yoga, especially yin yoga changes our inner chronometry, gives us a better sense of present-ness. This presence makes normal, daily experiences into"new experiences", like the vacation paradox that Daniel Kahneman theorized about in this article above.

3. Yin yoga is nurturing me on a deep level

In the same way that a healthy diet nurtures my body, yoga nurtures my mind and my soul. I began practicing yoga in the 80s, from the PBS show Lilias, Yoga and You at aged 15. Lilias' weird outfits never fazed me, instead I was fascinated by teaching my body to move in new ways with fabulous names, like Lion's Breath, Eagle Pose and Corpse Pose.  I loved the quietness and nurturing attitude of it. Something inside of me was drawn to yoga, I was was stilled and bolstered by it in a way I hadn't been before. And yin is this nurturing attitude embodied into a style. From that time, I never looked back and I am 42 still practicing yoga almost daily.
Recently I have found my sangha (community) in my new city (I moved to Vancouver Island a year ago): at a wonderful studio in Fan Tan Alley in Victoria with a wide variety of styles including yin. This community nurtures me as well, in my need for belonging and shared values.

4. Yin teaches me to let go and trust the process

When I started yin yoga I approached it with zeal. Zeal is the opposite of what was needed. For example, in child's pose, my first mistake was to get into this simple pose as deeply as I could. I have done it so many times, and normally it is a resting pose. But in Yin yoga a pose like this can actually get to be really difficult. After a few minutes of holding the deepest child's pose possible, the tops of my feet ache, then my mid-back, then a restrictive sensation in my shoulders. These various discomforts set off a string of mental monkey-jumping:  worry that it is hurting so much that maybe I am doing something wrong and really causing damage, and trying not to get caught up in the mental activity and focus on breath. If I am not careful I then get angry with myself and have to now let go of anger, expectations, and tension.
I have done Yin now so long that I realize that these mental questions and uncertain emotions happen a lot, so I refuse to move unless the discomfort strays into the realm of pain.I have learned to let go and ride through this process with compassion and close attention to my body's signals, as one would a best friend or a wise teacher. The point is to focus on experiencing the sensations, and let thoughts come and simply go, like clouds passing across a picture window.
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In some ways Yin is the most frustrating experience one can possible lay on oneself. And to think I pay for this punishment!

But since I have begun doing Yin yoga fairly regularly, I have begun to enjoy watching my mind flit about in this way. It has taught me a lot about how I handle small challenges in life: my habit is to  approach them with the same vigor that I used to approach the poses, then peter out and start the self doubt cycle. Yin yoga has allowed me to see this inner process and vigor as a form of violence. It is like bullying myself.
Instead I now try to start at the easiest point in a pose and slowly relax into a deeper place, in an attempt to honour ahisma (nonviolence) to my own body in my practice.

Yin yoga isn't for every yogi or yogini. But it sure has enhanced my yoga practice and my life.

New AU blog post

I was invited to write a blog entry on my experience in the Masters program for my school Athabasca University. You can find the piece On Grants, Grad Work and Gradualness here

I am finishing up my masters degree, finally, which means I will have a chance to get back to blogging.  Yeah!

In the meantime I am raising funds for my final project via an Indiegogo crowdsourcing campaign-

If you can help me out please do!
I will be back in 2014

Silencium Artifex, an experiment: Week 2-Feeding frenzy; from Accidie to Symphony-5 hours

I am content to follow to its sourceEvery event in action or in thought;Measure the lot; forgive myself the lot!When such as I cast out remorseSo great a sweetness flows into the breastWe must laugh and we must sing,We are blest by everything,Everything we look upon is blest.From Yeats, A Dialogue of Self and Soul

At first, like last week, I was relieved to have the space in the silence, I could stretch out, cat-like, relieved of my modern working-woman's responsibilities, settle in, cultivate some present-moment awareness. As last week, at first I slipped easily into a contemplative, deliberate, “monk like”  mode of being, where each act or step took on a sacred quality. Yummy warmth spread over me, it was wonderful. But this lasted a grand total of 45 minutes.

For some reason this week, as hour 2 loomed, I found myself getting agitated. I began continually checking the clock and drumming up “to do” lists. Thinking of all the things that could be “crammed” into the silent time: writing a paper, cleaning the bathroom, reading an essay, playing with the cat, etc. and beginning to mentally schedule these into the following 4 hours. Although outwardly I appeared calm, inwardly my mind was frenetically dashing from one possible activity to another, I couldn't decide which to do first. I kept opening the pantry to see what I could eat, with the idea if I had one more cup of tea, or a piece of chocolate, or something salty, just that one more thing, then I could concentrate better and get one of those tasks done. It was reminiscent of that classic scene in the movie Adaptation where Nicolas Cage’s character’s insights on the creative process are spot on:“To begin…To begin…How to start? I’m hungry.....Ok So I need to establish the themes.... Maybe Banana Nut. That is a good muffin. ”But then I would eat something or drink something, and then feel the need to go have something else. This kept going until eventually, stuffed and angry at myself, I had to just stop.

According to some creativity coaches, this is a common pattern of avoidance for creating “real” work.
I realized this. So after this mini-manic binge, I sat. Rather than “run” anymore, I decided to meditate to see what came up and avoid those inner voices telling me I should go do something else. It was like I was trying to be anywhere but here. I realized I needed to be here for a while to see what was going on.

I sat for about 17 minutes and watched my thoughts impotently buzz inside my head like a fly trapped between two panes of glass. I was so tempted to get up and do something, but instead I just sat and watched them and tried not to get carried way on any one thought. I imagined my thoughts as being printed on a ticker tape as they were running through my mind, I would label them: there goes a planning thought; oh! a critical though; yep there is an analyzing thought... a reminiscence...an angry thought. Etc. This is a trick I learned in my meditation class and once I begin doing it, the thoughts become still and calm and there becomes space between the thoughts in stillness.When the thoughts slowed down I began to see how I had a bunch of pent-up, inexplicable emotions inside me: anger, frustration, both at myself, and at people from my week.I realized that the agitation and distraction attempts were, for me, an attempt to run from the pain of these.

So I tried to gently accept them. Once I did my whole body relaxed. This is always the way for me: when I recognize and embrace the emotion, the feeling eventually dissipates and the body will “sigh” in relief. 

This is a technique of acknowledgment from a wonderful book called What We Say Matters: non Violent Communication (Buddist communication practice) by Judith Hanson Lasater. Once I realize what the feeling is, I can then connect it to an unexpressed need-for wellness, connection or expression. This process is so amazingly transformative! So when I am angry at a fellow driver, I can recognize my anger and acknowlege its validity, then I can ask what it is inside myself that I needed that was not met, in this case perhaps respect. Then, I can really be powerful because I can ask myself-do I really need to be respected by every driver on the road to be calm? Does the world need to be a certain way for me to be a certain way, or do I have the capacity to be who I want regardless?

This is hugely transformative. This is the essence of NVC-that you learn to be able to live connectedly, to yourself and others, and more harmoniously in the world.Sometimes I have to do this process several times. Once I hit on the right feeling and need, my body immediately tells me so. I often get a sensation of a big “sigh” and tension melts away when I do this process. 

So on this day, I acknowledged my frustration and realized it because I wasn’t meeting my need for control and calmness. I was not able to “be” present and this frustrated me.Once acknowledged, other feelings emerged: loneliness, sadness, and even ennui. I began to wonder if this whole experiment was pointless and I was ultimately and sadly alone and unappreciated in this quest, in this world in general. 

In A Book of Silence, Maitland talks about a condition common in hermitage known as  “accidie”: a state of mind that so deeply associated with silence that ....(it is known as) ...the mental prostration of recluses” (108). She quotes Cassian:Accidie, which we may describe as tedium or perturbation of heart...is akin to dejection, and especially felt by solitaries....we become listless and inert...it produces such lassitude of body and craving for food as one might feel after the exhaustion of a long journey and hard toil” (109-110).I was feeling exactly this- increasingly dejected, listless. The items I had created in a mania on my to do list before my meditation, such as writing this piece and reading my book, suddenly seemed completely pointless and far away. I was overcome with sullenness and accidie.Historically, accidie was the seed for what became the fourth deadly sin, sloth, but originally the word had a very specific meaning that as more directly related to silence. Maitland describes it as a bored, restless sense of dissatisfaction, a blankness, and an inability to get things done. This emptiness is what we are avoiding with our busy-ness and shopping mall trips. We are afraid of it as a culture. But, determined to live in opposition to that, I want to know myself, to feel misery, to face it head on and, possibly with a little luck, slay those monsters in myself, or learn to love them if need be. According to Brown's Ted talk (on vulnerability), we can’t avoid negative emotions without also shutting down the good ones. I don’t want to shut down the good ones. I want to live as Townes Van Sant said, To Live is to Fly, low and high. 

Maitland makes a strong case that accidie is not abnormality, or personal in origin. She argues that it is a natural quality that arises from the asociality in silence. Everyone who experiences silence experiences accidie. Thus it is similar but not the same as depression because the cure is the completely opposite: depression requires gentleness, support, eating well, avoiding stress, being kind to one’s self. Accidie, however, requires the opposite approach: hard work, penance, and strict rules of self discipline. 

For some reason this idea buoyed me: that these feelings are entirely normal, that there is a cure and it lay in the simple, cleansing act of hard work.  So after reading this I set to work. This darkness, I realized, was my quest. Not to avoid it or question it, but to work through it. I set to work. I began reading a series of intellectually challenging articles for a class I am taking. Although at first I had trouble concentrating, I took notes and did an analysis and critique and by the end, when I looked up, the time had passed quickly and my 5 hours of solitude and silence were almost over.I noticed immediately that this work had taken me to an entirely different head space. The accidie was gone. 

Once I stopped working and paid attention to how I felt, I found was buoyant, beyond happy. Ebullient! I had gone, in less that five hours, from deadened agitation, to full immersion, I was cracked open emotionally and feeling vulnerable and beautiful. 

From my own journal at this time:“Everything feels crystalized and precious, so lovely, so brilliant! Life is beautifulness beyond words. I am vessel of expansiveness. My chest will burst with the joy of it. My sight, smell, hearing- senses are a wondrous gift. I am so grateful”

The sunlight was filtering through my window, reflecting cleanly off the trees in a shining as I hadn’t noticed before. My cat’s thrumming purr was symphonically gorgeous. My husband suddenly seemed very dear, affection welled inside of me. I hypersensual, the beauty around me was so overwhelming. 

What was this complete change when only 4 hours earlier I had felt nothing? It was so strange!Again, looking at Maitland’s book she had a similar response to silence that she describes and she found examples of this over and over in the silence and explorer literature.“...I saw a whale or porpoise,-no a sea monster-turning in the water, rolling. A silkie perhaps, a seal woman, lovely and perilous. It was, in fact, a rock with the water rolling over it-but the water seemed to be still while the black shape rolled through it. I leaned against the car and rejoiced. It was not an anguish of loveliness, but a complete, huge, calm, silent joy of loveliness” (76).Maitland called this state “givenness” and she makes an excellent case for the necessity of silence in producing it. She says it is that the act of silence, a conscious act of adding something (not simply removing sound), and this state aids in removing the boundaries between self and environment, that self merges with the universe in a oneness and flow. And what accompanies that is this fullness of feeling and love, wondrous connectedness. I felt that connectedness then.I could not contain the loveliness of my home, my world, the joy of it. I was full of givenness.And this feeling lives in the silent places in the world. This is Yeats' sweetness that flows into the breast when we cast our remorse aside and are willing to just sit.__

Lesson in Silence:

Silence this week gave me the space to feel the changes in the current, moment to moment, of the tides of my mind and emotions, the ebb and flow. This went from resistance of the moment, manifested into frenergy (frenetic energy), and then later, despondent lethargy. But in order to flow into connectivity and happiness, (letting myself sink into the greater masterpiece as Leonard Cohen says), I had to allow for silence. Silence gives us the space for openness to the full range of experience. John Kabat Zinn calls this the openness to the full catastrophe of living.  We must be silent in order to be in synergy.Be silent. Face the boredom, the darkness. Use focussed work to transition from frenergy to despondency to synergy. Don't be afraid. The result is so powerful and transformative, it is so worth it.

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Hason Lasater, Judith. What We Say MattersMaitland, Sarah. 2009. The Book of Silence.Melucci, A. 1994. The Symbolic Challenge of contemporary Movements. In S.M Buechler and F.K. Cylke, Jr (eds). Social Movements: Perspectives and Issues. Mountain View, CA: MayfieldTed talk on vulnerability. 2010. Brene Brown
*book links are to one of my favorite local independent bookstore’s website

figured out how to use comments finally! so if you want to comment, please do

Silencium Artifex: an experiment-- The push and pull of silence

The pull of silence

Silence seems to me to be totally underrated as a source of personal energy and personal power in our Canadian culture. Rather than being encouraged into silence, we are often pushed to be extroverted, to “get out” and “do something”. Someone who prefers quiet environments is often portrayed as a loner, antisocial (a pejorative word for an introvert) and even strange. Background noise is ubiquitous as I guess it is expected that people want a little noise. So for example I was on a long bus trip, and rather than giving the passengers silence on the three hour journey, some dimwit decided that people would rather listen to popular rock music. Why would I rather listen to the Doobie brothers or Hotel California that the sounds of the rocking bus? Or for that matter, than my Ipod?

For those of us who define themselves as HSPs (Highly Sensitive Persons)  like me, background noise is a serious drain on our energy (Aron, 1999). While some people might find the buzz and music and bouncing noise of the radio, or the clash of sounds in shopping malls, for example, an exciting attractant, I find it an absolute drain on my energy and a frustrating abuse of power by the people providing the space. I am being bullied into their listening choices. 

I can’t think of a place I hate more than shopping malls. 

The theory with HSPs is that because some individuals are more sensitive to stimulus than others, they become overstimulated very easily. Overstimulation for me leads to crankiness, fatigue, physical discomfort, even hot flashes and sweating and nausea. Early warning signs for me are what I call “museum head”, a spacey, foggy void, and lack of ability to think clearly. 

Why I am more sensitive than other people is unclear. In the HSP book (Aron, 1999), it is assumed to be an ingrained personality trait. However in my case it could simply be that I have not spent a lot of time in malls since I was a teenager, so I am simply not “deadened” to all that noise, the same way I have a really hard time ignoring a TV when there is one in the room, because I don’t have one at home.

According to a psychologist I know, such overstimulation in mall design is intentional. Each store plays a different song, preferably songs that are stimulating and faster than the average heartbeat, so customers “speed up” with the song. The songs are not meant to be soothing. The hard surfaces are meant to reflect and bounce sound around. The harsh bright lights are also a sensory stimulant that are intentional. He says this is because studies show that when people are overstimulated they make impulsive decisions, against their own rational self interest, such as overspending. 

So as a humanist, a nature lover, a critic of monopolistic capitalism and a social activist, my response to this sort of manipulation is to increase the spaces for silence in my life and offer it to the people I love. 

This is what I am calling the “pull” of silence-it pulls me toward it as an idea because I want to stand up for the silent spaces in our world and the clarity and serenity that comes to me in such non-commercial spaces.

The push of silence

But there is also a second meaning to the word silence: in the sense of not speaking. There is a scene in Eat, Pray, Love in India, where one of the pilgrims was wearing a badge that notified others around her that she was in silence-as in not speaking or making verbal sounds of any kind. Elizabeth Gilbert was drawn to this and so am I.

My aim for this experiment is to take time out each week, a good block of time (ideally 5 hours consecutively), to stop all self-generative noise. I create a lot of noise, and in some ways, I define myself by the noises I make. The cooing and supportive noises I make to my cat show that we have a relationship, that I care for him, thus I am an attentive and loving pet-owner.  The chatter that I subject my husband to at the end of a day, means I am the type of wife that reaches out to him, cheerful and energetic. The phone calls I make to friends, to connect and support them or make plans to see one another. The daily calls to my mother, an attempt to be a supportive daughter for a women who is in her 70s and lives alone. So my social roles, and how I see myself in those roles, is related to this noisemaking.

But I also crash dishes in the kitchen, and play my guitar, I sing, I write music, I whistle, I chatter, I hum. I chant when I meditate. I like the feeling of using my voice as an instrument, the resonance inside my chest, the feeling of being a broadcast centre when I use it. I am a sales rep so I do my work by using my voice.

I also feel like I work ideas out while I am talking to people, ideas that might start the conversation as a niggling itch at the base of my consciousness, that by the end are flesh and form. I have spent most of my life believing that I need this discourse to think at all. 

But I am “pushed” toward silence by something inside of me that knows that, on some level, all this endless vocal output, is a slow burn for the energy that could fuel a very  large bonfire. It is a fifth chakra air spill, slowly leaking the air out my creative balloon until it deflates and leaves a pink, sad, rubber condom on the ground. All this cheery sociality leaves nothing of longing and ache, nothing of the need to reach out, in other words, nothing at the end of a day to use as fodder for writing or creative generation or thinking. 

So this is the “push” inside me to silence my voice.

The idea of intentionally silencing one’s own voice may seem strange for someone who loves indigenous oral traditions, stories, and who claims to be a feminist. After all, is it not our stories that connect us to one another? Is it not our voices that have been silenced for thousands of years of patriarchal hierarchy?

Yet the intention in this act, and the celebration of the inner world, is strangely empowering. I am setting the rules

So this “push” of silence, in the sense that there is something internal in me pushing for this space inside myself that I want to explore, is my experiment. 


I have begun a pact to create a silence space each week that consists of 5-7 hours of not talking, not imposing or creating auditory distraction. 

Week 1:  self nurturing, creative blossoming

5 hours 

I began today feeling refreshed and healthy.  The silence was an act of self nurturing. For the first few hours I felt content, thoughtful, self contained, strong. 

I was also relieved. I felt a weight lifted off my shoulders. now I didn't’ have to be “a wife” today and speak to my husband. Or a daughter and call my mom. I could just be invisible and indulge myself in my own thoughts and ideas. Deliciousness.

About three hours into it, I accidentally said a random word aloud midstream in a thought, for no reason. The word jumped out of my mouth spontaneously, like a fish breaking the surface of a still pond.

I was startled. I crossed my mind that the word came out of me as a way for me to check in with myself. For me to see if I was still here.

I have begun reading a wonderful and unusually deep little book called A Book of Silence by Sarah Maitland, who introduces silence into her life intentionally, including spending 40 days of silence alone in a cabin on a remote island in Scotland. In researching for her book she comes across a tradition of silence in literature, or at least about the human narrative in a remote conditions, including Into the Wild and some other books a like this. 

One of the discoveries she makes in reading these, and in experiencing her own silence, is an increased sense of losing the bounds of her identity-that is of losing where her mind and body begins and ends in space. It is like one’s own voice is a reference point to the self as object and as identity; without the voice, and hearing one’s own voice as listener, perhaps we fall into a state of the subjective, with a loss of the sense of also being an object in space. As a non-object to others, to my self. 

Perhaps my my inadvertent exclamation came from a fear of losing this sense of identity? If I didn’t hear myself in that time, perhaps I would lose myself.

But then I resumed my pact for the two remaining hours. 

I began to liken my creative production to an expanding balloon, and it is precisely the building and growing and pressure of its own internal forces, in the sense that the air inside is like expanding creativity. It is the force of the internal pressure that drives one to create. But I realized that my dialogical approach to work out fledgling ideas actually serves to drain my creative spark, sucking the air out of my ballon so to speak. And every time I chatter away I let out a little of that air. And that indeed relieves the pressure. 

One of the things that led me to this experiment was a dream. It was after I took a class on Jungian dream analysis and body movement and how, in order to discover one’s next developmental task, one can look to their own dreams for guidance on the next step. It was a workshop put on by The Calgary Jung Society who hosted the teacher, Inge Missmahl, in November 2011.

The idea is that if you look at the action that you need to take in a dream, especially a bad dream or a recurrent dream, you can get a clue as to the next step in your life’s development. In my dream I was being verbally attacked by my peers, in this case fellow publisher reps. They were criticizing me. My dreamself sat at the table and tried to defend herself, and felt increasingly weakened and worn down and demoralized by the end. 

I woke in a terrible state of humiliation. I can still recall the details, even this, years later. However, I realized after that the right thing to do in the dream would have been to stand up, ground myself as we do in Mountain pose in yoga, and let the insults and assault wash over me. To stand in silence. I didn't have to defend, that I could just be simultaneously vulnerable and strong in silence.

The other book I read was the Artist’s Way by Julia Cameron. Each week she encourages artist time to "play" and “fill the well” of creativity. This provides us with images and fodder for creative sparks of genius. 

But in that relief I lose the drive to create. It is precisely the pressure, the ache, the drive, almost an internal violence, that generates the creative “big bang” moment that leads to a flash of brilliance. The pressure is uncomfortable but it forces me to put it into a creative outlet, whether that be a song, a story, a poem, a dance, or a research idea. 

So it dawned on me that in order to generate my creativity in my own life, I needed to not talk about my unformed ideas. I needed to sit with them and let them come to me in other ways, through dreams and pictures and visions and poetry and sensuality. Talking was “forcing” them along and into a rational head space, and I needed to let them filter up, in silence, in non verbal forms.

So today in week one I absolutely found this element. I found my ideas flowing at one point, so freely and openly I had to sit to write them down lest I forget them. As well, a problem I have been working out in the backdrop, about what to focus on in my upcoming thesis for my masters degree, suddenly came to me clear as rain in a creative swoop, like a great stork dropping a beautiful bundle in my waiting lap. 

Silence lesson: 

I learned about the link between my silence and my contribution to the universe as a creative being.

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Aron, Elaine. 1999. The Highly Sensitive Person: How to Thrive WHen the World Overwhelms You

Cameron, Julia. 2002.  The Artist’s Way

Gilbert, Elizabeth. 2007. Eat, Pray, Love.

Maitland, Sarah. 2009. The Book of SIlence.

• Note the links will take you to the page of the book for one of my favourite local independent bookstores in Calgary: Self Connection books but they did not in any way know I would link to them, and these are not books that I sell as a publisher rep (except Book of Silence) and I won’t receive any monetary gain from them

Please support your local independent bookstore if you choose to buy any of these books, or order them online with a store like Self Connection