Breaking your silence
How to get to a safe place - creatively and physically.
This is the second part of my March essay in the Festival series. This month I use the festival of Nyepi - Bali’s day of Silence as a jumping off post. If you missed the first half you can find it here.
In the first half I looked at how special days can help us get used to the interruptions of regularity that will happen in our creative lives. Now we can get to the part about the silence itself….
As I wrote this essay I felt a strong intuition to take this essay in a particular direction. In the past when I have felt that pull I have found out later there is one person out there who really needed what I wrote. For that reason I have lifted the paywall on this post. However there is a short poll (one question) for paid subscribers right at the end.
Last year I went on a five day silent retreat. It was held in an old house with formal gardens, animals and peacocks, a labyrinth surrounded by wheat fields. It looked an ideal location for companionable meditation and contemplation with other silent people. The problem was, at the bottom of the garden was a mainline train line. Every few minutes the windows rattled as the London bound train pelted past or a goods train with seemingly endless carriages rumbled by. Silence, we very quickly came to realise, was going to be much more about the internal experience of withdrawal than an external one of serenity.
It’s this inner experience of embracing voluntary silence in the context of creativity that I want to focus on here rather than the experience of being literally passively silenced by someone or something else. (Not least because I believe, possibly controversially, as we shall see, that the former is much more common than the latter.) What are the benefits and harms of periods of silence? What might that look like? And how do we come out of them? What happens when we do?
Photo by Nick Fewings on Unsplash (Sculpture in a tree including the word silence).
The nature of silence
(a) the helpful kind of silence
Our world is not primed to encourage us to be silent. The algorithms of social media and the culture in the creative world encourage us to share what we are doing on our retreats, to post images of our mediation mats and to be inspirational and generous by making visible and audible what we create. In Covid, when in many ways the world outside fell silent, streets empty and the skies quiet, the online noise exploded. Silence has become an aberration not a norm for many of us. Is that a natural thing? A good thing for us as creatives?
One form of silence is to withdraw from groups and online noise to be able to hear our own voice, to process the input we have gathered, to puzzle out and to find new ways of expression. Artists residencies and sabbaticals support such silence. This is a delicious and productive treat to be encouraged. Even that spaciousness, however, is still outward focused in its intended end result. It’s still a vast amount of chatter within our own heads.
Harder is the silence of voluntary emptiness and inactivity, the silence which we allow to occupy us and to resonate within our chest cavity. This kind of positive silence needs us not only to be passive but to allow a recognition that under the usual recognisable din of our creative lives the to-do lists, the books to read, the demands of obligations, the onslaught of inspirational videos and images, lies a more sinister noise. If we send the family to the in-laws and silence the phones, drape a cloth over the books cases and simply sit, we will hear the noises that we have been drowning out with all that surface clamour; the noises of our own thoughts and beliefs, the rattling of skeletons in closets and the thunderclaps of imagined divine condemnation.
Of course we never really achieve silence. We will always have the voices in our heads. Sometimes they sounds like the far cry of a peacock in the knot garden. Sometimes they sound like the 10.32 express service to Kings Cross. Either way, meditation is but a practice at allowing those thoughts to float past and not to hold on to them. Silent meditation weeds our minds of all kinds of pervasive psychological lianas. Seeking a retreat-like internal silence can - will - bring influential thoughts to the fore and require us to identify them and their influence on us before we let go.
And here is where I might get a bit controversial. Many of the thought that we will find rushing past us in our attempt to sit in a positive silence will be thoughts that silence us in an unhelpful way. Too often we recast those thoughts as other people silencing us. Let me explain with an art related visual and a sidewise look at this from my law background.
(b) the harmful kind of silence
Years ago I attended a quilt show and saw an art piece which depicted women in domestic settings. These women had no mouths. It concerned me. No it didn’t. It made me fuming angry. The artist was standing in her booth and I felt great deal of rude outrage erupting inside me so I walked around the show a good bit and calmed down before I went to talk to her. I started by asking her what the work meant to her. She explained that it was about all the ways women were silenced in relationships. The problem I had with it was that the women were not gagged. They had no mouths.
There is a vast difference between saying on one hand that a person (of any gender, culture and situation) is not being listened to, is afraid to speak, is (sensibly) protectively censoring what they say because of their circumstances, is not invited to express themselves, is not equally included in creative opportunities, and on the other hand saying that person is incapable of speaking.
It is not a semantic difference, it really matters. It matters because all the victims of domestic violence I worked with over a long legal career started their journey to safety because they understood that they had a voice and could use it. Eventually they spoke out loud to ask for help, but initially they used their voice to whisper their desires for peace and love and escape to themselves. It matters because in our creative world our ability to whisper permission to ourselves is the start of all our work.
Before we speak to others we have to speak to ourselves. We must hear the possibility from our own internal voices, allow those thought-words to form intentions and plans. If we tell others - be that women in abusive situations or creators in the wide world - that they have no mouth, no way at all of ever being heard or believed by others, and that message is internalised, the process of transformation and gaining freedom never starts. If however we say, “Yes, it feel like you are gagged but gags can be removed, yelled through, chewed off, and I will help you,” then that internal voice will be used. It will start as a tiny whisper and grow strong and determined and will lead to action.
So my question in this essay - to myself and to you - is this. Under the beautiful creative retreat silence and under the more challenging meditation practices, do you ever tell yourself, metaphorically, I have no voice, I cannot make noise in this area. Any area where you silence yourself and blame others, blame the culture. Where you tell yourself, incorrectly, that you have no mouth?
Because you do have a mouth. You have hands too. You may feel unheard. You may feel there is danger in making your art, in telling your story, in spreading the word about your passion. You may feel that outlets are limited, that there will be hard consequences. You may well be right. But you still have a mouth and you still have hands. You still have something of worth to say and make with them.
( And of course if you face a disability which mean you physically are lacking a relevant body part, you can know that there are many creators who make art and have their impact in the world using alternatives. I am using the terms mouth and hands metaphorically as well as literally.)
You may well need help — or maybe it’s better to use the term ‘collaboration’ — to speak, to make, to publish and to show. You may need help, collaboration, to navigate dangers and disadvantages, but you still have a mouth and still have hands. There is still a way to use them and to do so is powerful. And very scary. Very.
To go back to the relationship example. Statistically, the most dangerous time for a domestic abuse victim is just before and just after they leave the relationship. After makes sense. They have told a secret, have escaped a bully, a captor who will want to regain his power. But the evidence is that the danger increases before they leave, before they speak out and ask for help, before they open their mouth and tell their story. Why? It is because the internal talk, the using of their mouths in private to speak their desires to themselves to tell themselves stories of possibility creates a power that is silent but felt. The abuser senses the internal changes and responds to the increased power by upping the ante.
This is why we do so much work to create secret safety plans and to enable places where victims can be supported and safeguarded in this transition stage. Why we want minimise the time spent at this stage and make it easy for victims to leave or get other forms of help as soon as they feel they want to. It is why we have learned a great deal about how to help people leave safely and why that work is ongoing. It is because of this support that I have seen so many women and men who have left safely. This is a whole topic for a different essay, a difficult one, which I have already written in a variety of other spaces (and I give resources on it below), but I mention it here because I believe it is the same dynamic with our creativity. Our true power as creators comes not from having easily available external opportunities, it comes from the drive inside us to create.
When we face what seems impossible - even dangerous - in our creative lives or in our relationships we can tell ourselves we have no mouth. In so doing we shut away the possibility of what we truly long for in a dark box festooned with chains and padlocks buried deep within our soul. If, however, we tell ourselves that we feel firmly stymied, that we feel gagged and inhibited, but that underneath all that, we still have a mouth, we have power. There is no locked box. There is only possibility -dimly grasped maybe - but possibility nonetheless. The belief in even a faint possibility leads to action and action leads to change.
Danger in the context of creativity need not mean a physical danger, though of course there are creators in parts of the world who face just that. It can also be a psychological danger - the risking of security, the disrupting of normality, the testing of acceptance, the changing of identities. Nor does it have to be a big life threatening kind of danger. It can simply be the risking of something small but precious to you - a friendship maybe or a change to a financial budget. Or as in my case writing this essay, the risk that readers I cherish will unsubscribe!
Nor does the creation you desire have to be a huge world changing declaration type of creation. If planting tulips in your front garden feels dangerous because you are taking money from a family budget and risking been seen as selfish and irresponsible, that beautiful, gentle, generous form of creation can be stymied if you tell yourself it is impossible, that you can’t rather than you choose not to.
Using out mouths and our hands to say and make what we want to can take us into very new spaces in our lives and there is huge reward in that but also the transition can be difficult. So how do we do it?
Emerging from silence in saftey
(a) the helpful kind of silence
There is some danger in emerging even from the delightful creative retreat type of silence. Even if we have only been in it for a matter of hours. The danger that we leave the insights in that special place, that we emerge into a shrieking world and immediately immerse in everyday life without any change. I think the answer to that lies in awareness and preparation.
Being aware what is driving you too long for a retreat in the first place gives you a list of what might undo the benefits of that retreat. Before you leave the silent place, spend some time considering what new power you have gained from your internal talking on retreat?
How might your new power threaten what is in your life already?
Where do you need to let that threat come to fruition, to allow an element of change, adaptation, or destruction so that you can continue what you learned on retreat?
Where do you need to strengthen your existing structures so that they can contain your new power?
Build in a buffer zone which is neither retreat or normal life, such as a pit stop with a journal and a coffee on the way home from physical retreat. Or it could be the returning home but with the clearing of the diary for a day of two. If you have had a small period of silence at home is there a ritual you can use to make the boundary of retreat and normal time? I particularly like the Jewish ritual of Havdallah, used to mark the end of Shabbat and which includes the smelling of sweet spices to remind us to take the sweetness of retreat into the normal days.
(b) the unhelpful kind of silence
At the bottom of this newsletter I have some resources for leaving the abusive relationships I used as a comparison and which are all too common. I learned so much in life from all the men and women with whom I sat in refuges and conference rooms and who passed through my court room. They are true survivors and had much to teach about mindsets, asking for and taking help and transformation. If you or someone you love is facing this situation - and sadly the odds are high that that is the case - I hope the links below will point you to assistance. It is possible to move from victim to survivor and there is help to do so.
Here, however, let’s look at it from the creative point of view. How do we get from a solid belief that we have no mouth, through the understanding that it's more of a gag and from there to speaking out? And how do we do that with safety?
(In this context when I say safety I don’t mean completely risk free but I mean paying heed to the necessities of life, to the realities of the world. I mean without blowing your entire life up on some madcap plan to create a living from selling liquorice flavoured origami swans, made from organic rice paper hand, made by you on an off grid plot of land in Botswana, without first doing some feasibility testing and some planning. I mean in a a way that doens’t trigger our primeval brain to respond as if a starving lion is coming across the savannah to eat us.)
First, don’t do it alone. Do it with support. Find a community who can model to you how to use mouths and hands. That might be face to face but if that’s not possible for you join an online group or just surround yourself with free podcasts and You Tube videos of people doing what you think impossible for you. In this way you gather evidence that IT is possible. Of course you may still battle the belief that it’s possible for them but not for you. Which is where acting ‘as if’ comes in.
The phrase ‘fake it util you make it’ is pervasive but I never use that with coaching clients. All it does it train the brain to hear the words fake over and over and that’s what it will believe you are. One big giant fake. How is that helpful? Rather I help people to ‘act as if’:
Write down what it is that you believe you cannot achieve, who you cannot be, Define the ultimate outcome that is not allowed for you, is too scary, or is pointless to try.
Ask yourself, if I was a person who did live that life, what is the smallest possible step I would take next today that’s is also possible for me right now?
I mean teeny tiny weeny almost invisible step. If you want be a book author it could be opening Word or Scrivener on the computer. If you want to bake a beautiful wedding cake it could be opening the door to the cupboard where you keep flour. Tiny, weeny, minuscule step.
Then do it.
Go on. Now. Just do it. There! For a moment you lived the life of your dreams. now do the next teeny, tiny thing. Repeat. Don’t jump to, “Oh I see where she is going. But eventually I’ll have to sit down and write 5000 words of my memoir and I can’t do that because my mother will never speak to me again.” Just do the next thing. And maybe another tiny thing.
As you do this harmless tiny things say to yourself. I have started and it is safe. the sky’s not fallen in. I am doing exactly what my future desired self would do. I am living a part of the dream right now. I am acting as a writer/artist/ baker/ insert word of choice.
Note. There is no fake in this. You are actually doing what it takes. Choose the low hanging fruit to start with. Easy things still need to get done. Choose next steps that build up a safety plan, putting a dollar in a savings account or looking for the name of a therapist to one day call and one day discuss your mother with. Whatever you need. Build up your evidence that you can do the any steps that eventually amount to the life you want and keep repeating the positive self talk which is then evidenced by the actions in a nice virtual circle. Just keep going.
Eventually as you are no doubt predicting - you will get to a challenge. The next action is bit scary, or has some problems attached. Now you can tell yourself: well I once thought I couldn’t even start and now look, I am a creator facing life as every creator faces it with challenges and problems to be creative about. There is a way to do this. And there is someone who can collaborate with me to do it whether there is a friend or a stranger on You Tube.
And so on you go, taking the next tiny step. That’s what Stephen King does every day, what Banksy does, what the artist with the booth at the craft fair in your town does, what Beyonce and Jeff Koons and the lovely lady who makes the cakes for your village shop does. Everyone just acts as if. Everyone just lives the life the way they can at this moment in time.
Emerge from silence by telling yourself the next tiny step is always possible because its not the step itself that’s so powerful, its the telling yourself you can do it, that you are doing it, that you are the person who is the type to do it that is powerful. It’s that repeated embedded message that gets you free from harmful silence.
Shalom.
Helen
Resources for leaving abusive relationships
US based:
UK based
Canada based
Australia Based
New Zealand help
Justice department list of agencies
Helen, I really enjoy your thoughtful and insightful writing. Thank you for being here!
"It matters because in our creative world our ability to whisper permission to ourselves is the start of all our work." Beautiful - I will hold this reminder each time I sit down to work, my "permission slip".