A much venerated practice (abhyasa) in many traditions is that of silence (mauna). In the Tantric tradition, refinement of all aspects of practice, knowledge, and our lives is encouraged, and speech is no exception. Restraint of speech is a most valuable practice, for many reasons.

At the deepest level, being quiet and going inside during meditation garners access to the silence of the highest consciousness, the silence of the innermost self, the quiet steady ground of being that underlies everything. And that silence is not dead, but alive, it is vibrating. My teacher Paul Muller-Ortega calls it the “vibrating silence,” the pulsating radiance of our deepest self, which is the ground of our own being and access to which allows us to bring that luminosity and love out to the surface of our everyday life.

As a practice, there are many other benefits of silence (more than I can go into here), an important one is that as we go about our activities outside of mediation we can rest the activation of our social persona – all those parts of us that most of us think are actually who we are as people. This includes all our roles in life, our past experiences, and so on. As householder practitioners, we each have many roles and responsibilities to fulfill as we unfold our own beautiful and unique offerings into the world. This requires a great deal of effort, and one of the greatest gifts of silence is to simply take rest.

This rest of our surface social persona first of all is, well, REST. Because is it not exhausting sometimes to just keep showing up in the world? It takes a lot of energy to animate our persona in all the different domains of our life. But as well, silence allows us to better experience who we are underneath all of that, and rest in the quiet space of awareness itself. And this give us the experience and practice of resourcing this deeper place inside so that as we emerge into activity and non-silence we can remember, return to, and access that place that is always there.

When we regularly connect with a deeper part of ourself, the vibrating silence is pulsating with an energy that can give us so much if we listen. You cannot talk and listen at the same time. Our ability to listen is heightened when we are quiet, so silence is a unique opportunity to listen and observe. Part of that is watching as thoughts and impulses arise, and disconnecting that from the immediate impulse to act, by resisting the impulse to speak.

For myself, from this practice of silence I’ve garnered an ability to watch the impulse to speak or act, and pause to evaluate if it is necessary or perhaps choosing to be silent is better. I have an increased capacity to just shut up. I pause and ask myself: is my speech necessary and useful, and if so, how can it be most useful in the highest way?

Particularly on retreat, when I’m doing a lot of meditation, I can be agitated (which is part of the process of burning off samskaras) and I may want to say to do things from that place of agitation, but because I am also practicing silence, I don’t speak. I watch the impulse and I don’t immediately follow it. And many times later I realize how unimportant what I wanted to say was, how it was unnecessary, or how it might have stirred up things or create unnecessary drama.

And I’m getting better with doing this on a moment by moment basis. So many times in recent history I’ve written some comment/response on social media, and then paused, and decided to erase it before posting. Unfortunately there are still times I haven’t done this, and I’ve regretted it. And of course there are times I do speak up as I feel it is necessary and useful, but I take some time first so it is a reflection of the quiet place of my heart rather than surface agitation.

REFLECT AND EXPLORE

PRACTICE mauna/silence for a day, it could even be a weekly or monthly practice. As you do so:

– Take note of the moment the impulse to speak arises, and make a conscious choice on whether to enact that impulse.

– What does this teach you about any habitual patterns in your life?

– Do you notice an increased ability to listen to the deeper parts of yourself?

– How does this translate to your everyday householder life?