Author: Jae Ryeong Sul

A Silent Garden

Posted on by Jae Ryeong Sul

Guest post by Jordan Adshead

Life, it seems, is getting louder all the time. According to one estimate, an astounding 15% of all human experience belongs to those of us alive today. That means that an awesome and unprecedented concentration of human life is focused on this specific moment. The world is busier than ever and it’s hard if not impossible to keep up with everything that happens. Following the news, no sooner has one crisis claimed our attention than another clamours to take its place. We hardly know where to look.

But it’s not just that there are lots of people around. We are increasingly living closer and closer together, too. A growing share of human beings today live in cities, with 56% of the global population now living in urban environments. Such spaces are dense hives of stimuli. Taking a walk through a busy high street, we are immersed in a discordant symphony of neon signs, advertisements, the buzz of a thousand conversations, cars and trucks, sirens, the sweet smell of fried doughnuts and the pungent reek of dumpsters. And everywhere something to do, somewhere to eat, something to buy. Wherever we turn someone or something wants our already saturated attention.

This kind of experience can be stimulating, intoxicating, and – let’s be honest – even kind of fun. There is a buzz about the city which we can’t find anywhere else. It feels alive and, in it, we feel alive too. But it is likewise possible to lose ourselves in the noise, to grow numb and fatigued with it. As our skin grows calloused by the repeated action of touch, our minds grow calloused by the repeated action of stimuli.

Encircled by the summons of a busy world, it can be tempting to think of silence as dead or idle time, time when we could be doing something productive. But silence can itself be productive in its own fashion. Ten years ago, I attended a meditation class headed by the Buddhist monk Ajahn Khemadhammo. The session took place at 6pm, after a long day of work. We were to sit for a few minutes in silence and focus only on our breath. Simple enough, right? Well. At the end of this fitful and restless endeavour, Khemadhammo supposed – correctly – that we had, each of us, struggled to concentrate. Pulled hither and yon by our churning thoughts, aching backs and legs, worries about tomorrow, and the urge to get up and do something else. Our hurried minds, it felt, had a mind of their own.

Laying quietly in bed that night, I was awed watching the ebb and flow of my thoughts and feelings, rising and falling according to their own whim. Even if I willed them to stop, they still stirred. Though they were, undoubtedly, my thoughts, I could not exactly call myself their author. Thoughts come to us. But what struck me the most was that this had been going on throughout the entirety of my life, right under my nose. How could I have possibly failed to notice it? What else had I failed to recognise?

According to how we actually experience it, it is not – as Descartes had supposed – that “I” think. Nietzsche perhaps said it better when he wrote that “a thought comes when ‘it’ wants to and not when ‘I’ wish”. In this way, the mind is a little bit like a garden. We are no more the author of our roses than we are our thoughts. We cannot compel a flower to grow. We can only plant the seeds, nourish them, and let nature do its thing. Just as a flower needs soil, sunlight, and water, understanding needs silence in order to bloom. Without affording ourselves the opportunity to experience silence in our lives, it is entirely possible that we will look right through it.

Author Bio

Jordan Adshead is an AHRC-funded PhD student at Durham University, presently working
on a phenomenology of apathy in the face of ecological crisis. Beginning with the premise
that apathy is a modification of situated human behaviour, he argues that we can better
understand apathy by placing it within the context of a phenomenological study of human
existence. The current aim of his research is to expose the nature and existential possibility
of apathy and to probe how apathy is articulated in and through the urban-virtual milieu of
contemporary post-industrial society.

Spaces Between Us – A Therapist’s Reflections on the Meaning of Silence

Posted on by Jae Ryeong Sul

Guest post by Caroline Greenwood Dower

Psychotherapy is understood as the ‘talking cure’.  “It’s good to talk” has become a mantra of efforts to de-stigmatise mental ill-health and distress.  But sometimes it is good not to talk. So what is the role of silence in the process of therapy?

As a practicing psychotherapist, I see the aim of therapy as restoring, or initiating, a set of possibilities for how the individual relates both to the world and to themselves. Some qualities of silence reveal how the individual has closed, or been closed, to connecting with the world and with themselves. Other qualities of silence offer possibilities for greater connection with the world and with themselves. Silence between us may feel respectful and empowering.  Silence for the individual may offer the space for deep connection with the felt-sense of their experience.

How can we know the difference?  How can we come to an awareness of the quality of silence we experience?  It surely begins with a close attention to the quality of the present moment.  How is this individual before me for me?  How do I experience myself in their presence?  How are they with themselves?  Their words, their experiences, are important, of course.  The key issue though is how words, or the lack of words, feels between us.

If the silence between us was expressed in a gesture what would it look like?  Our talking and our silence has moving qualities.

In my silence am I receiving them, taking a moment to consider them deeply?  Am I refusing to offer something?  Does it feel like a withholding of something they want or need, or dread?  Or am I offering something to them – a warm encouragement for them to continue with their private contemplation or musing?  And their silence – are they refusing me, blocking me, putting a wall between us for their safety, or mine?  Or are they taking a moment, feeling the support of my presence, to open to themselves?  Am I providing a containing structure, or a neutral background, for their own awareness to unfold?  Does the space between us feel spacious and calm, or does it feel charged, narrowed?  I use a fully embodied sense of the moment to feel how I am moved by and appear to be moving my client.

And yet, how can we know?  I may imagine that my silence is supporting their awareness, and they may be sat on the other side of the room full of anxiety for how I am holding them in my mind.  As I fall silent and consider my client, they may feel excited by being of such interest to me, or it may be threatening.  It may not always have been safe to have been privately considered.  And as they sit in silence, are they opening to themselves, or dissociating from the present moment, or quietly losing a sense of themselves and their reality, and unable to say.

The challenge, of course, is that to really know, we will need to enquire, but enquiry inevitably breaks the silence.  Therapy above all is a process of clarifying experience, and mostly we do this through the words – through describing our experience, and through words being put to that experience.  Our experience comes to make sense, to the therapist and to ourselves.  Again and again I have witnessed the relief that comes with the deep realisation that we make sense.  At some point, it will surely be helpful to reflect openly, verbally, on the quality of the silence.

In therapy and in life, it seems to me that an important skill is to have the capacity to move between states of deep experience and states of reflection upon the experience.  A therapeutic skill – to be aspired towards, and rarely achieved – is the sense of timing.  How long to leave the experience of silence to unfold, and when to enquire into that very experience, in a way that offers the possibility of making new sense without prematurely cutting through an important moment.   And how we will know?  We can feel how our enquiry lands, or we can enquire about how the enquiry felt?  More talking… And so we go on… in a rich journey of exploration, moving in and out of experiencing and reflecting.  As we move, how can we find support, or an anchor?  Perhaps one valuable anchor is a quality of respect – respect for the value of talking and the value of silence. 

Author Bio

Caroline Greenwood Dower is a psychotherapist and researcher.  As a psychotherapist she has a particular interest in integrating embodied awareness into talking therapies – so how we non-verbally create our world and relate to it.  Her academic research is on anxiety, looking at developing a deeper awareness of the embodiment of anxiety may contribute to our understanding of the phenomenon and point to new ways of supporting individuals with chronic anxiety.

Silence and Gaia

Posted on by Jae Ryeong Sul

Guest post by Amber Sahara Donovan

Only in Silence can you hear the wisdom of Gaia

Sometimes silence is necessary to experience the truth that cannot be communicated in words. When in nature, silence can help us to access the wisdom of the natural world, the wisdom of Gaia.

Gaia is the name of the ancient Greek earth goddess. More recently, Gaia was revived by NASA scientist James Lovelock and microbiologist Lynn Margulis to name their vision of our home planet as an organism itself, an organism so large that humans are reimagined as something like bacteria. 

The presence of humans, like bacteria, is neither inherently good nor bad. Many of us would consider the bacteria that make up our gut microbiome as part of our bodies. However, when bacteria amass in our body in a less helpful way, we don’t consider this ‘part of us’ and instead call it an infection. Humans stand in a similar relation to Gaia. When our movements support this great system of life, we are part of it and when our movements are destructive, we become an infection. 

In the West, our daily movements are sadly more akin to infection than microbiome. Acts of sacrilege rather than reverence. Our culture of overconsumption does not support the internal homeostasis of Gaia; it threatens it. Facing this reality is hard. Especially when it often feels like no matter how many changes we make to our individual consumption habits, it is but a drop in the water compared to what is happening on a larger scale. 

Thoughts like these have often filled my head and weighed down my heart with hopelessness and despair. What can I do?! How can I help?! Will it ever be enough?!

A tonic for such thoughts can be found in Silence. In Silence with Nature. Silence in the presence of those parts of Gaia whose status as part of her – as microbiome or vital organ, rather than infection – is indubitable.

Here I want to bring attention to a specific kind of silence that the beauty of Nature can impose upon us, where our senses drink in not only the view but also the entire atmosphere that permeates our existence. In this silent moment, our eyes widen in awe, and elation expands through our chest.  We feel a rush of connection and a primal sense of belonging so deep that our ego seems to dissolve. For a moment, we become one with the natural world and experience the profound realisation that everything is connected. We glimpse what it feels like to be a true part of Gaia: microbiome and not infection. To care as deeply about Gaia’s health as we do our own, for in that moment, we realise they are one and the same. 

This phenomenon was dubbed ‘Self-realisation’ by Arne Naess (1989), the father of the Deep Ecology movement. He suggests that this visceral realisation of the interconnectedness of all things is fundamental to environmentalism. Such an experience is most readily had in Nature. It both humbles us and reminds us of who we are. Reminds us that we are part of a larger whole: that its health is our health. 

A similar phenomenon, called ‘the overview effect’, describes the effect that seeing Gaia from space has on astronauts (Yaden et al., 2016). It is characterised by an overwhelming feeling of awe, a profound understanding and sense of the unity and interconnection of life and a renewed sense of responsibility for taking care of the environment. Interestingly, these astronauts also report lower levels of depression and anxiety after returning from space. Once again, this is an experience so arresting that it plunges you into silence. 

Importantly, attempts to render these experiences in words will inevitably fall short. Words cannot fully capture these experiences. They are ineffable and must be felt. Therein lies their transformative power. 

Yet, most of us will never go to space. And spontaneous experiences of Self-realisation don’t happen all that often. Most of the time, to have such an experience, some conscious effort is required to shift our attention. Silence is paramount here. 

In the beautiful book ‘The Living Mountain’ – often described as a love letter to the Cairngorms – Nan Shepherd reflects that the right kind of hill companion “does not detract from, but enhances, the silence”. She contrasts this with those whose incessant chatter “left [her] weary and dispirited, because the hill did not speak.” (Shepherd, 2009: 39). 

It is all too easy to walk in the hills and yet forget to be silent and allow space for the hill – for Gaia – to speak. 

We must learn to quiet the voice that wants to measure and quantify. The voice that wants to know exactly how we are going to fix things. The voice that wants to pin things down and put them in boxes. The voice that wants certainty without faith. 

When the hill speaks, it does not speak in words. It does not shame nor chastise. It does not demand solutions. It embraces. It humbles. Its imposing presence impresses our own insignificance and vulnerability upon us and invites us to accept and embrace our dependency on Gaia. 

From this place of acceptance, we are moved to take responsibility for our own actions and to treat Gaia with care and respect — not because this is guaranteed to ‘fix things’, but because we recognise that this is part of what it means to be human. This is how we, in the context of our own lives, become part of Gaia, and not an infection to be fought.

This felt understanding of the interconnectedness of all things cuts through the noise of anxious rumination. It frees us from the responsibility of ‘fixing things’ and gifts us a sense of belonging, a sense of belonging to something bigger than ourselves, to something mysterious and wonderful. Silence in nature can be a powerful tonic to the environmental anxiety which grips many of us and can lead to apathy in some. Such experiences of silence with Nature can be transformative and support our wellbeing in a deep and primal way. 

References

Naess, A. 1989. Ecology, Community and Lifestyle: Outline of an Ecosophy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press

Shepherd, N. 2009. The Living Mountain. London: Cannongate

Yaden, D. B., Iwry, J., Slack, K. J., Eichstaedt, J. C., Zhao, Y., Vaillant, G. E., & Newberg, A. B. (2016). The overview effect: Awe and self-transcendent experience in space flight. Psychology of Consciousness: Theory, Research, and Practice, 3(1), 1–11. https://doi.org/10.1037/cns0000086

Author Bio

Amber Sahara Donovan is an AHRC-funded PhD student at Durham University in Environmental Philosophy. Her work begins with Mary Midgley’s claim that the concept of Gaia can serve as a tonic for the conceptual emergency at the root of the climate crisis. She explores how metaphorising with this concept can help alleviate environmental anxiety and help us take positive action in the context of our lives. 

Silence and Writing

Posted on by Jae Ryeong Sul

The world is noisy. It’s been about a week since I moved to Bristol from Durham. I notice how different this city is to Durham. There is a lot going on here, and the hustle-and-bustle seems to be the constant theme of this city. Amidst the constant buzz of traffic and chatter, achieving some level of silence for my mental health has felt like an uphill battle. So, I resort to what I know best: writing. Regardless of whom I write for or what I write, I have noticed that my writing involves a somewhat mysterious (?) element. Sometimes, this element helps me to achieve and maintain the kind of silence I am looking for, sometimes, well, not so much. I hope there is someone out there who can relate to this post! 

When I write out what I want to say using my hand (well, with pen and paper), the words that come out at the end of my pen capture all my attention. Actually, this is not quite true. I’m not focused on each word I write. Mostly, I’m focused on what is already written and what is yet to be written. When writing, I feel this momentum that propels my hand from the already-written words to the not-yet written words. It’s almost as if the already written words push my hand to write the next words so that they can be a part of a complete sentence. I feel this tension between what is actually there on the paper and what is not there yet, and, through writing, I resolve this tension. 

Now, what’s mysterious about this experience is that in this moment of tension everything (including myself) falls silent. All that inner chatter in my head  and everyday life concerns I have just go away. The general acoustics of my surroundings, say, the sound of my colleagues coming into the office, pulling their chairs, adjusting them, yawning, sniffling, clearing their throat, typing away, and, sometimes, even calling my name (sorry! I couldn’t hear you) – all this – go away too.  The world just gets tuned out. Everything falls silent, and I am at peace. 

Does this mean that writing always helps me to achieve this peaceful silence? Short answer: No. Sometimes my hand cannot keep up with what I want to say. Words are too long and too slow. So,  I “write” in dots, shapes, lines, and arrows. I find this not at all peaceful nor helpful. My concerns come back, and I start to comment on what I write as I write. Whenever this happens, I stop and just go for a walk. 

So, for better or worse, I write. 

Now that I have written this out, I realise that perhaps this experience is unique to me. But I doubt it. I suspect that we all have these kinds of experiences – perhaps, when we are playing games, cooking, cleaning, painting, or meditating? What do you think? Do you also have this kind of experience? We would be very grateful for your input!