Reflections from my silent (not silent) retreat

I’ve just returned from a 4 day silent retreat with the Mindfulness Network and their incredible teachers Rebecca Crane and Jaya Rudgard. It’s the second time I’ve been on a silent retreat and the experience was different, despite it being at the same venue with the same teachers, but it was just as powerful!

The retreat was aimed at Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) or Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy (MBCT) teachers and focussed on deepening our understanding of the first three of the four foundations of mindfulness which are (1) mindfulness of the body (2) the feeling tone i.e. whether something is pleasant, unpleasant or neutral and (3) the mind states which can be understood as our mood and how we know our mood through our thoughts, emotions and sensations. I can’t possibly share the wisdom imparted by the teachers or the depth of this learning within a blog, but I will say it was deeply life changing.

Some things do stand out though.

The retreat brought into reality the importance of acknowledging impermanence – how things come and go, evolve and change – and of how when we practice being with whatever is there with a sense of friendliness and curiosity our experience can soften. It’s quite amazing what we can sit with.

The venue was located in Great Hucklow and two weeks prior to our arrival on the 13th March it had a freak tornado. It caused havoc in the local area and at the venue destroyed trees, smashed windows and the greenhouse, extensively damaged the roof and blew the shed into a nearby field! Thankfully, no-one was hurt.

We arrived (on a Saturday) to scaffolding around the building and we were told that the roof above the meditation and teaching room was being repaired on the Monday. Then more news followed, and we were told that the electrics were damaged, and they needed to dig up the drive to fix it. As a short-term solution electricians worked through the night installing an electricity generator directly outside the room we were based. It was loud!

I was on a silent retreat but that doesn’t mean the world was silent. It shows how connected we are to one another, how reliant we are on other people, how much we take things for granted, and how the world and its weather can affect us.

It brought into stark reality that there is often little in our control. I’m grateful for my mindfulness practice and how it supports me finding stability within, even amongst the noise and devastation around.

I noticed that when we allow unpleasant sensations to be there, when we don’t fight against them, it creates space within us to notice the many pleasant experiences and those unpleasant experiences can fall into the background (sometimes). I soaked up a lot of wonderful moments from feeling the sun on my face, to hearing the birds and to simply noticing the taste of the food I was eating.

Interestingly I noticed how often my mind re-lives conversations with others, creating some mental loudness with feelings of discomfort and how, when I spend time in silence, this internal noise quietens.

Despite the silence, the connection with the other participants was palpable. I enjoyed being with like-minded people each passionate about mindfulness and each navigating the experiences we were having. Each one of us relating to them differently which is interesting in itself. We often think that an experience creates a reaction within us, but actually our past experiences and how we are – what our mood state is – is a greater influence of our reactions than the actual experience itself.

I have returned home feeling more resilient, incredibly grateful to the teachers, participants, electricians, roofers and cooks who all worked hard to look after us. I feel nourished, inspired and even more committed to my mindfulness practice and in delivering the MBSR course to others because of the powerful impact it can have.

I want to share the below poem by Rachel Holstead which was read to us on our final morning.

Please contact me if you’d like to learn more about mindfulness and if you’d like to book onto my next 8-week MBSR course starting on the 12th May.

Perfect by Rachel Holstead

You can’t make it perfect.

Life has a habit

of popping up to remind you of impermanence.

Be graceful in letting go,

in releasing that perfect dream.

Let yourself come gently down

to reality, to how it really is

and to the constant change

that happens whatever we do.

Set your feet on the ground again

and let yourself flow with the earth’s turning.

There is no perfection but this dance

with all its colours,

nothing to do but the living and letting go

of every moment.