The Unfathomable Benefits of Keeping Your Mouth Shut
Five days in a silent retreat
For the first three hours, speaking was allowed.
I wanted to be totally quiet. I told myself, “Just listen, Ros, don’t start on one of your stories.”
But I am an inveterate storyteller, and before we were on the dessert, I had, on the smallest pretext imaginable, told the whole table about my mother’s nipples and the scarring effects of her nudism, plus, I am horrified to say, my own bra-wearing habits and how inordinately proud I am of my boobs.
Shut up, Ros!
Too late.
Then a post-supper cup of tea at the outside tables.
Me: “Do you mind if I sit here?”
Unsuspecting victim: “No, not at all.”
Before I know it, I have overshared again. The poor woman says something sweet when I mention my adult child still at home, and sensing the slightly open door of her compassion, I boot it back on its hinges to swamp her with the story (and backstory, all the way to toddlerhood) of the other son, who is estranged.
Oh, Ros, FFS!
As the bell rings to call us to the first meditation, cutting me off in full flow, she says, with magnificent kindness, “It sounds like you have a lot to process.”
Oh boy, do I.
So the descent into silence that immediately follows? What a glorious relief that is. No more opportunities to overshare. No further self-humiliations. Not a single chance of putting my foot in it.
There is no better way to live with 28 strangers than in total silence.
May everyone bite their tongues. Small talk be damned and be dammed. Unwanted advice, swallowed like your own medicine. Assumption banished to the quiet recesses of your mind.
What will the mind do without mindless chatter? Without distraction from those screens and devices which addict us to the illusion of community?
Maybe some old wounds will surface for healing. Maybe, in the safety of breathing and birdsong, the original, undamaged you will come up for air.
Sharpham House is an 18th-century Manor House near Totnes in Devon, England. It perches on a hill above a bend in the River Dart, the estuary below breathing water in and out twice a day. Nothing around it but the ornamental gardens, grassed hills and woodland. A house of incredible architecture, which you can pad through in your bare feet, feeling the cool flagstone beneath your toes, the warmth of polished granite stairs.
The bare feet were not obligatory. Take your shoes off in the grand Palladian entrance, yes. Wear slippers or socks against the cold of flagstone floors. The polished granite staircase. But later, as we and the week warmed, after thirty minutes mindfully treading barefoot on cushioned lawns, there was a tremendous freedom in continuing, barefoot, into this huge, grand-yet-welcoming house.
But the freedoms, for me, of not speaking are truly profound. When the UK went into lockdown in March 2020, this was a significant upside. No more social faux pas. Total freedom from fucking up with people who don't know me. Instead, time to process all the cringe of my last few months speaking inappropriately to total strangers and allow it to subside.
Sharpham was this, distilled even further. Because there were no conversations with people who knew me, either. No electronic messages or phone calls. No tech at all: just a journal, a pen, and my thoughts.
"Silence is the perfectest herald of joy.”
- Much Ado About Nothing (II.1)
Silence is unbelievably liberating. We escape our stories about ourselves. Our adopted identities. We are freed from feeling like we have to show or prove who we are. We are released from others doing the same; from status battles and power struggles. We are completely relieved — oh the bliss! — from small talk. From navigating conversations that bore us. From anyone else’s negativity or drama. All you are left with — and this is the greatest of gifts — is your own.
Because in the silence, it unravels. Especially if you choose, as I did, not to fill the gap with other forms of input. Very purposefully, I decided not to read. In the beautiful library, where some of us congregated in companionable silence, many embroidered, knitted, crocheted, or read. But I was determined to do nothing at all to distract me from my thoughts. I journaled (which is both thinking on paper, and recording my process), but other than that, I stared out at the view, or (lying on my back on the grass) at the sky.
There were walks, in bare feet and boots. Down to the river to contemplate the wake of a small boat lapping the shore, spotting shelducks and herons. Up through ornamental woodlands bathed in birdsong. Wading through the wildflower meadow, accompanied by butterflies.
Our days were blessed with a few vital anchors. A bell woke us at 7 am, if we weren't already up having tea. At 7.30 we gathered outside for Mindful Movement, in air textured by birdsong or very light drizzle, the dewy grass under our toes. We faced the great bend of the river, whose sounds — a puttering boat engine, a canoe’s dipping paddles, a conversation — carried up the hill with striking clarity. We breathed in and out in unison, drinking in the valley’s dark-wooded flanks, and the ever-fluid sky.
On all but one day, we were able to break silence for an hour every morning in our “home groups” (stable for the week) of six or seven, facilitated by one of the workshop leads. I was keen to stay schtum, but in fact, this brief and structured sharing was illuminating and important. As soon as distraction and chatter were eliminated, “judgment” became a striking feature of my mental landscape. How easily I made assumptions about people based on how they looked; how I feared their judgments of me! In the home groups, with only meaningful, vulnerable words exchanged, I found an antidote.
A woman who described herself as “a chatterbox” — let’s call her B — who I’d instantly judged for her stream of chatter as we ascended the lift with our suitcases (pot, meet kettle) revealed she had been born into, and spent the first 38 years of her life, in a strict religious cult that told her, with her mother’s reinforcement, that she was sinful and despised by God. Yet with enormous courage, she had, 20 years ago, escaped into an outside world she had been trained to see as terrifying, losing everyone she knew. What an extraordinary and admirable person; what a journey she was on! And in the homegroups, it was clear that everyone was an extraordinary and admirable person. A learning you can extend, beyond retreat, to every person you meet.
Mindfulness meditations (some guided, some silent) were the backbone. Forty-minute meditations, together in the Octagon Room, began at 8 am, 12.20 pm, and 5.20 pm, each followed by a vegan meal with optional cheese. A final meditation, with guidance, was at 8 pm. A bell was rung through the house ten minutes ahead of the meditations to let us know, we who were living beyond the clock.
On the central day, there was no speech at all. No home group meeting. No guidance. And this day proved pivotal.
I journaled fifty pages while there. What follows is a distillation of the process by which I underwent a significant healing.
Day 1: Arrival and pain
I pulled up in my little red convertible with a bad dose of neck pain and a headache. In preparation for attending, I had pulled a “classic Ros” and overdone it, including the day before, spending four hours (until 10 pm) potting up petunias. That night, cringing at having done what I despise in our tiny window of speech, I wasn’t feeling great. But in the silence and absence of distractions that followed our first meditation, I began to tap, journal and process.
Day 2: The unravelling
On this first full day of silence, I unravelled. My headache and back pain persisted. I felt bone-tired. Many of us slept heavily on Days 2 and 3, both night and day. I continued to process what was arising from that first couple of hours of interaction and my stuff around judgment. In the afternoon, I took a yoga mat out to the lawns. My half-hearted attempts at cobra and downward dog quickly collapsed into what I described in my journal as “a long shivasana” straight on the grass. Part of it gazing at the sky, which I have loved and long-missed. Sleep arrived, and I lay under an overcast sky until the sun broke through and the heat of it woke me.
On my early evening walk, recounting a litany of blessings in an attempt to lift my mood, I looked up to see, in a perfect arc across the valley, a double rainbow, which felt meaningfully timed. From this place of uplift, the night’s meditation unlocked a recent pain. Something I had denied to myself, which was full of truth. I was surprised by the physicality of my response. The door to healing opened a crack.
Day 3: The wounded child
My neck and head pain eased. After lunch, I felt strangely tired and lay down on my bed, not intending to nap, but slept heavily for over an hour. When I came to, I was still very groggy and might easily have gone back to sleep except that I rolled to my right, thinking I was to the left of the Queen size bed, and rolled myself heavily onto the floor, banging my skull on the corner of the bedside table's marble top. An egg rose just behind my right ear. It felt peculiar as hell not to have told a single soul about it. My “needy child” self was becoming clearly outlined.
And I was here, as I mentioned last week, at least partly to address my Mother Wound; the source of my oversharing habit. So this was good.
In the communal silence of the library, an idea surfaced. Watching the wind whip up the line of trees, they looked completely alive, living sentient beings. I don't think I'd ever seen trees look so truly animated. And as I watched them, the idea of writing letters to my estranged son surfaced, not because I need or want anything to happen, but just to tell him some things. I wrote the first of three letters to him.
Looking up, I saw B in the grounds in a light pink coat. She stood facing the hill and did the "breathing wave” mindful movement. I felt overwhelmed with love for her, to the point of tears. Drizzle began, and she put up her hood. She did a small swing, but the skies opened and she left. It was such a brief moment; she was there no more than a minute, but it made a deep impression on me.
In evening meditation, I saw my grandmother’s face and voice. The line of damage and suffering through her and Mum to me was palpable; I sensed her apology, and it felt like something was mending. At the same time, I had a strong pain, like ovulation pain, in my right ovary, very noticeable for about 20 minutes, and I did my best to allow it and fold it in; it felt connected. This chain of pain mother to child.
Day 4: The breakthrough
Our Total Silence Day. I would love more days like this. Get thee to a nunnery, Ros. Except, my understanding of religious orders is that their rigidity and dogma wouldn’t be a good substrate for my growth.
The healing of the mother wound was already, though I didn’t know it, complete. I received these words.
"That child is put to bed.
That needy child is put to bed."
As a result, the next level of consciousness opened its doors. I’ve had experiences like this one before, but this time it was like the doors were opened all the way back on their hinges and secured in place. Breakthroughs of the power of this one are deeply personal, and this one requires a level of confession that even I (the inveterate oversharer) would rather not make freely available. So I'll share those details with my paid subscribers next week, where I can explore the more vulnerable aspects of this transformation.
Day 5: Consolidation
You know how it is when something amazing happens, and part of you worries it won’t last? Day 5 was a day for establishing that the shift I experienced the day before was permanent. I received that reassurance in several ways during the final full day of silence. And it began, at breakfast, with a single sentence arising in my mind which encapsulated the huge shift from the day before. A sentence that, instead of knowing it intellectually, I knew all the way down to my core.
It doesn't matter at all what my mother thought of me, because she was damaged.
Day 6: Departure
Silence was officially broken at breakfast. I was at peace. Although it’s easy enough to slip back into old habits. B, the woman from my home group whose life story so moved me, instantly switched back into “chatterbox” mode. And as we were loading our luggage into the boots of cars, she said something (full of assumption) that snagged me.
Yet I caught my irritation. I considered how much she needed to say it for her own reasons. I recognised that it had nothing whatever to do with me.
Back in the world
You can know something intellectually and it makes no difference. If you are carrying a Mother Wound and you read these words, they will not change your life:
It doesn't matter at all what your mother thought of you, because she was damaged.
The response is “Yes, of course, but that doesn’t change how I feel.” A bit like when I did a year’s weekly counselling, aged 21-22. At the end, I had a full understanding of why I was fucked up, but I was not less fucked up.
You have to know this sentence in your heart and bones. It has to have arisen in you naturally, experientially, with a powerful wave (or series of waves) of feeling. The old damage stored in your body has to be released. There is a process, and the process can’t be skipped.
I’ve been working on myself, almost daily, for 18 years next month. (July 2007 was when I discovered EFT tapping.) I have had breakthrough after breakthrough. This deep-rooted wound feels like the final level of “stuff from my past”. The boss level, if you're a gamer. And yet I know from past shifts that the onion has seemingly infinite layers. So we’ll have to see what’s next. Currently, I am working on physical stuff that has more recent roots.
The Mother Wound has been a major focus for me since late 2022; I’ve returned repeatedly to hack away at it. What I’m saying is that there was a lot of preparation that enabled this retreat to have as profound an effect as it did. But I will also say there wasn’t a person there, among the 26 participants and two leaders, who didn’t report, in our farewell sharing, a powerful insight or shift.
One of the leaders noted that the River Dart was particularly high on Day 4. On my walk to the North Quay that morning, I’d noted the river overspilling the grass. The reason? Our fully silent day, my breakthrough day, was the Spring Tide New Moon. Powerful timing, for those who recognise the phases of the moon may affect us, especially when we are living closer to nature.1 We are animals, and yes, animals are affected by the gravitational pull which gives our seas their pulse.
Across multiple cultures, the New Moon has long been associated with new beginnings, transformation and growth. At a spring tide, the moon’s gravitational forces are strongest. So the timing of my breakthrough day might be seen as fortuitously optimal for releasing old patterns and embracing change.
The proof that my shift is profound and permanent has played out in the two weeks since I returned home. My husband says I am an “upgraded model”. My son and daughter have observed that I am “more chill” and “more flexible”. And me? I am very aware that I am operating differently, without a sense of pressure, without my (lifelong) urgent need to prove myself.
The Mother Wound is healed.
C. Helfrich-Förster et al. “Women temporarily synchronize their menstrual cycles with the luminance and gravimetric cycles of the Moon.” Sci. Adv.7, eabe1358(2021). DOI:10.1126/sciadv.abe1358
This is tremendous: “I considered how much she needed to say it for her own reasons. I recognised that it had nothing whatever to do with me.”
Glad it had such a profound and healing effect, Ros.