Hello Insight Timer,
My name is Piko Ayo.
For more than thirty years now,
I have been experiencing the power of silence.
Not just an absence of noise,
But a kind of thrumming,
Wide-awake presence that liberates.
In a world that's racing past at the speed of light,
Updates,
Texts,
Notifications,
I step into silence and suddenly I remember what I love.
Everything essential rises to the top.
I'd like to share a single moment with you that changed my life.
It began with losing everything.
But as the months and years went on,
I saw that amidst the loss,
Many doors had swung open,
Doors to a greater clarity,
To a freedom from clutter,
To a sense of what really matters.
Today I'd like to invite you to share that discovery and to see what happens when you step away from chatter just for a moment and simply listen.
Some years ago,
I was sleeping for many months on a friend's floor.
My house had burnt to the ground in a wildfire and I had lost every last thing I owned in the world.
One bright midwinter morning,
I drove three and a half hours up the coast to a retreat house I had been told about.
At least there I'd have a bed to sleep in,
A long desk,
A private walled garden overlooking the Pacific Ocean,
Food,
Showers,
All for $30 a night.
When I arrived at the top of the hill where the hermitage sat and got out of my car,
The silence was pulsing.
It wasn't just an absence of noise,
It was really a presence,
Maybe just of everything I'd been sleepwalking past in my daily life.
I went down to my small but comfortable room and suddenly I was seeing the world so directly it felt as if a lens cap had come off.
I spotted a rabbit on the splintered fence in my garden and somehow that rabbit struck me as a small miracle.
Bells began tolling behind me and it really felt as if they were inside of me,
All division between inside and outside had been dissolved.
I took a walk after night fell under a great overturned salt shaker of stars and I could see the taillights of cars disappearing around the headlands 12 miles to the south.
Truly,
I felt calmer and clearer than I'd ever felt before,
Even though a few hours before I'd been full of agitation and chatter as ever.
So I started going back for two weeks,
For three weeks,
Sometimes even staying with the monks who ran this Benedictine monastery even though I'm not a Christian.
By now I've been there more than a hundred times over 33 years.
I trust silence because it sits on the far side of our beliefs and ideas.
When we talk we're soon at odds,
I believe I know more than you or better,
But silence is a shared communal space in which we're joined in our deepest self where divisions are not important.
Our silent self has no need to cut the world up into you and me or pro and con,
It lives inside a larger ocean.
Not all of you,
I know,
Have the time or means to go on retreat,
Even though there probably is a retreat house of some kind very close to where you live.
But the beauty of silence is that it's non-denominational,
It belongs to all of us.
Take a walk next Sunday along the beach or up into the mountains.
When you're in the middle of a crowded city with a lot to do,
Step inside a church for a few minutes,
Even if you're not a believer.
When you're waiting for your partner to come home,
Turn off the lights and listen to some music.
Instead of killing time,
You'll be restoring it.
Humans have always needed silence and always been united by moments of silence,
But the world has never been so deafening as it is right now.
Our heads are crammed with the latest update,
That recent newsflash,
That Instagram posting from 5 seconds ago,
The thought of what we have to do 3 minutes from now.
We can't hear ourselves think,
Or not think.
My hope is that you can choose to sit quietly,
Without your devices,
For just 20 minutes every day.
3% of your waking hours,
But it could easily transform the other 97%.
My sense is that once you do that,
You will remember what you love,
And clear the clutter in your head to recall what really matters.
I think that you will emerge from your quiet not every day,
But often and increasingly more joyful and more calm,
Much better able to deal with the complications that cut up every life.
The external world is only going to get faster and noisier,
So it's really up to each one of us to ensure that we don't get lost in the clamour.
Cut through the noise and suddenly you can see the larger picture,
Sift the trivial from the essential.
Before you know it,
Your day may last a thousand hours.
I do wish you joy.
