Hi Barbara,

Great to see you here!

Your 3 day retreat sounds wonderful. Adding the power of nature to the intention to be in silence sounds like a potent combination. And Nature is often quite noisy!

XOZ

Hi Karen,

I, like you, meditate at the beginning and the end of the day, and I really notice the effect when I miss a session. It’s such a great way to recharge.

I love this description of the “waiting” practice. Wow. The power of that many people gathered together with the intention of being open to messages from the Divine is wonderful. It truly is a golden experience. 🙂

XOZ

About 25 years ago I did a 3 day silent retreat in the wilderness. It was wonderfully done with a cultural anthropologist who provided us rituals before and after we went into the woods in silence. I learned how relentless mother nature is and how much I needed to be in silence with Spirit and listen!

xoxo

Whether it’s a little or a lot, silence is rejuvenating at the least for most folks and transformative for many. I meditate at the beginning and end of each day, and if I start to “slip” a little with my practice, I notice it.

It’s wonderful how so many traditions embrace silence. One of the most interesting I encountered many years ago as a born-again Christian was a “waiting” that an area minister would hold periodically. People would fill his church on a Saturday morning, kneel all around the sanctuary (or sit if they couldn’t kneel), and then they would simply wait in silence for God to do something. They would wait in silence for hours, and people would feel “touched,” healed, and rejuvenated.

Reminds me of the song, “Silence is golden…golden…”

Hi Tanya,

Your retreat sounds not unlike mine. It’s kinda trippy what happens when you just hang out with some other folks in silence. I like that you say that you’re not even necessarily a “spiritual” person. There’s just that amazing thing that can happen when we step into that silent space, however we want to define it. Does it even matter than we define it? Probably not.

I haven’t read The Stand, but the phenomenon of opening to another world echoes my experience. Groovy and trippy and strange.

Thank you for your story! 🙂

XOZ

Not sure if you ever read any Stephen King, but in one of his books (The Stand), one of the characters talks about what it feels like to be alone and in total and complete silence — and how being in this silence opens you up to a wholly different world. Interesting.

Hi Lori Louise!

Yes, I think that my example was made easier by the fact that I wasn’t the one enforcing the rules of silence. Plus there were others around me all doing the same thing, which helped a lot. I suspect it would be a lot harder to do by myself, though I’ll have to give it a try at some point and see. The other benefit of doing it with others, as I seem to keep saying in these comments, was that there was the amplified power of the group intention and the group energy. “Where two or more are gathered in My name. . .” Something about the communal power really made the experience that much more impactful.

Great to see you here, as always! 🙂

XOZ

Hi Diane,

Glad you enjoyed the pictures. Including pictures in the blog was a strong part of the original vision, and I’m grateful to all the flickr photographers who are willing to share their work for free in exchange for inclusion of the photographer’s name and a link to their photo on flickr.

I would definitely recommend giving silence another try – especially with others. There’s something particularly powerful about being with others in silence.

XOZ

Hi Sherry,

The “dessert days” sound delicious. The experience you describe is very similar to what I experienced at the recent retreat. There’s something extraordinarily powerful about sitting in silence with others. For whatever reason, it seems to amplify that Thing that we’re all made of. What a gift to be able to experience that.

Great to see you here! Love to you,

XOZ