“Listen. Can you hear the voice of wisdom whispering in the silence?”
- Shani
The following passage captures perfectly what it means to listen to the stillness (or silence) and captures perfectly the intention for our time together:
Sacred Silence
- By Richard Rohr, The Centre for Contemplation and Action
Most of us who live in a capitalist culture, where everything is about competing and comparing, will find contemplation extremely counterintuitive. How do we grasp something as empty, as harmless, as seemingly fruitless as the practice of silence?
Silence needs to be understood in a larger way than simply a lack of audible noise. Whenever emptiness—what seems like empty space or absence of sound—becomes its own kind of fullness with its own kind of sweet voice, we have just experienced sacred silence.
When religious folks limit their focus in prayer to external technique and formula, the soul remains largely untouched and unchanged. Too much emphasis on what I call “social prayer” or wordy prayer feeds our egos and gives us far too much to argue about. How can we truly pray when we are preoccupied with formula and perfection of technique?
If we can see silence as the ground of all words and the birth of all words, then when we speak, our words will be calmer and well-chosen. Our thoughts will be non-judgmental. Our actions will have greater integrity and impact.
When we recognize something as beautiful, that knowledge partly emerges from the silence around it. It may be why we are quiet in art galleries and symphony halls.
As one author I read years ago said, silence is the net below the tightrope walker. We are walking, trying to find the right words to explain our experience and the right actions to match our values. Silence is that safety net that allows us to fall; it admits, as poets often do, that no words or deeds will ever be perfectly right or sufficient. A regular practice of contemplation helps us trust that silence will uphold us, receive our mistakes, and give us the courage to learn and grow.
As Richard Rohr so beautifully expresses, at the heart of all spiritual traditions is the recognition that we are One with all of life - that there is no separation.
Together let us embrace the art of listening to the silence…
and hearing the wisdom that transcends all words!
“When you don’t cover up the world with words and labels, a sense of the miraculous returns to your life that was lost a long time ago when humanity, instead of using thought, became possessed by thoughts. A depth returns to your life. Things regain their newness, their freshness. And the greatest miracle is the experiencing of your essential self as prior to any words, thoughts, mental labels, and images. For this to happen, you need to disentangle your sense of I, of Beingness, from all the things it has become mixed up with, that is to say identified with. That disentanglement is what this book is all about.”
- Eckhart Tolle, “A New Earth”
The Ho’oponopono Forgiveness Ritual
This ancient Hawaiin forgiveness ritual proceeds from an understanding of the unity of everything in the world, which is true even though we feel ourselves to be separate. Because everything influences everything else, we contribute to harmony if we discover our share in disharmony and enter instead into the healing process of directing the following four sentences to a person or situation (can be spoken or said silently):
I am sorry
Please forgive me
I love you
Thank you
On Grace…
“Grace is the constant love that animates, permeates and balances everything and everyone. When we bring awareness and gratitude to Grace, it awakens balances, and resolves even the unresolvable.”
- Pamela Wilson
“We need a return to grace. We are all fighting hard battles, and we need all the help we can get. Yet we’ve lost sight of grace, which for so long was an essential, treasured quality, and which ought to be at the heart of how we interact, how we inhabit our bodies and the world around us. Life in the twenty-first century is often rushed, clumsy, and frustrating. We’re distracted and we let the door slam on the person behind us, we trip over curbs as we’re texting, we’re running late, we fail to notice. Our bent postures show us the unfeeling habits we’ve fallen into. We’ve given into gravity. We’ve forgotten how to move through life with grace.”*
- Excerpt from “The Art of Grace” by Sarah L. Kaufmann
* We are here to remember - welcome to our journey! 💗