A year of living mindfully: a silence that truly speaks volumes

Eight days into my 10-day silent retreat, I broke down and wept. My body jolted and a well of sadness opened deep inside. My defences were breached.

Salty tears flowed down my face and landed on my lap. My hands were wet and my body shook. I had no tissue to hand, not even a bit of toilet roll.

I thought I was reasonably self-aware, but when this happened I was floored. I didn’t realise I was carrying such sadness. I was rattled, not so much by my tears, but because I didn’t see it coming.

In the days leading up to this I had been concerned that nothing much seemed to be happening. I sat for hours every day, I tried to be present, to stay anchored in my body and to be still. But nothing happened: no flash of illumination, no deep insight into the meaning of life. I felt a bit stupid; maybe I just wasn’t getting it. Maybe I wasn’t trying hard enough. Maybe this whole mindfulness thing, the mast to which I had nailed my colours for 12 years, was beyond my reach.

When I cried I realised that it had taken the first eight days of the retreat for my heart to catch up with the rest of me. Life had nailed me to the spot in St Flannan’s, Ennis, and when the time was right, my heart had sneaked up on me and looked me straight in the eye.

I sat in the low light of the meditation hall, weeping, surrounded by my band of silent brothers.

I was conscious that the men sitting on either side would notice. If they did, they didn’t let on. I was grateful for this small mercy. I was too fragile to handle their sympathy or their discomfort. I also appreciated the scaffolding that the leaders had put in place through their insistence on total silence and non-communication. These rules contained my pain and allowed it to breathe.

The skills we had been practising over and over also came into play when I got upset. After eight days of training in how to hold the body still in the face of physical discomfort, I was able to stick with my emotional pain when the unconscious came knocking, without getting stuck.

A flood of feelings emerged and died away. I could see now what the leaders meant when they reminded us that everything is impermanent, that nothing ever stays the same.

These emotions were the raw energies of my life. They were evidence that I was alive and that I was open and that at times life had broken my heart. And when it did, it hurt for a while.

I remembered times when I felt depressed: my depression had usually taken hold when I imagined there was something wrong with me because I felt sad or vulnerable, or because I wasn’t on top of my life, or when I saw though the hollowness of who I had thought I was. I usually became angry with myself for not being the person I felt I should be and responded with blame and self-recrimination. The bully was inside my head.

Like anyone else, I hate the pain. Feck the insights. It’s damn hard to stick with the hard stuff. Who cares if “This too shall pass”. I have spent my life on the run from hard feelings. But for once I opened myself to feeling the way I did without tensing and tightening or trying to run away.

In time, I noticed that I wasn’t holding myself as rigidly as I had been for days. Not that I was even aware of doing this to myself.

Some muscle deep inside me had softened and my body felt lighter and freer than it had felt for years.

I left the hall feeling shaken but connected and grounded. Maybe I was finally copping on: feelings are not facts; when we resist making up stories about our feelings, they flow and settle down. It's when we run from and deny our feelings, that depression and exhaustion come knocking, to wake us up and demand our attention.

Tony Bates is founding director of Headstrong – The National Centre for Youth Mental Health