A Week Of Silence
- Josephine Warren
- 3 days ago
- 6 min read
I cannot claim this to be a self-inflicted Vipassana; however, old lessons have come back to haunt me, and it has resulted in enforced silence, a wee cold turning into laryngitis, and a voice lost. A week of everything, paused.
The last time this happened, I had just opened my yoga studio in Lancing, I had been doing all the renovations, painting & business planning on my own, long hours spent painting vast walls, hanging fabric from wooden beams, heaving bolsters from one side of the space to another. I opened the studio, and after teaching just one meditation class, my voice broke, crackled and left me in silence.
This is my body’s last resort. I teach so many others with words of compassion, and to encourage rest and recuperation. But the last few months, I know the words I’ve been guiding with have been for myself, but I’ve not been able to follow through. I still fall foul of old habits, and the panic of getting things done, which tends to be guided by fear. And old friend, that has woven it’s way through family lineage, wiring and a life with a few traumatic events, that at times can steal trust and faith from me.
Money holds this for me too, I run a wellness business, and I am on my own, I just about make ends meet, and I feel so incredibly grateful to be able to follow my heart and lead this life, doing a job I feel so passionate about. But it comes at a cost too, I live a modest life. I see this around me, in friends & clients, the exhaustion, the pushing, the doing... As the world keeps leaning to help the rich, this pressure of ‘enough’ is so present for many. Money seeming to hold it’s very own full story and relationship in the journey of our lives.
I digress, my new retreat centre is happening because of family, those who have slipped to the other realm, and left me enough to just about make a foothold and a space of my own, and with a little last-minute panic-borrowing from my mum. I have manifested it, but it’s also a vessel for my grief. I have realised this in my week of silence, why I’ve not been able to stop, or slow down. Why so many hours have been spent compiling mood boards, why I’ve been knocking down walls, screwing in arcatraving, spent hours upon hours of painting. I am haunted by the fragility of time.
The body keep’s the score. I’ve realised this is an echo being projected onto me at the moment, the last time I built something. I lost it all. 26 days after opening my studio, lockdown arrived…. Then 2 weeks after that my father died, suddenly in a road accident. Written like this it feels simple and straightforward. There was more, so much more that unfolded over the following years, that not only compounded the trauma but also strained my nervous system. I am not writing this for sympathy, but it is part of the story. The wheel turning.
Time has passed, and from the loss, I found sound. I built even more into my spiritual practice. Meditation and compassionate living through teachers like Tara Brach and our own local Mark from Kalm Horizons lead me further down this path.
But no matter how much therapy, soundbathing, yoga or meditation you do, the spitirutal path(and a life with trauma) is hard to navigate, my body feels the familiarity of the hard work, the building, the creating and opening of something new and says ‘No, wait, last time you did this something awful happened, you are going to lose it all’. My body (as the book describes), remembers, and I think(self-analysis) that somewhere in the depths of me, I have just kept on going because the new fear, added to the old fear just felt too much to bare.
BUT, that is the magic of stillness, of meditation of ACTUALLY stopping. If we face our fears, in meditation, prayer or practice, PLUS resetting the nervous system, we find beneath it all, often lies the emotion, the sadness, the profound love, the hope and joy.
This week of stillness, I came home to my practices, coming onto my yoga mat 2 or 3 times a day, to be still, do somatic movement, guided yoga nidra, soundbathing. I also read a lot, had a bath everyday, ate loads of wholesome food, and drank more fluid than I thought physically possible. Still my voice remained absent. Silence remained a constant presence.
I don’t claim to be trauma-informed, but I guess that is where the path has led, in so many ways. People who are grieving tend to find me, for private sessions or yoga. There is a shared experience, a connection that goes beyond words when it comes to trauma and loss.
I fear, given the world we live in, that I am lamenting about small things, as more people around the world are driven into such extreme states of horror. But all these things can exist in the same space.
I can be here, in West Sussex, with no voice, and sharing my insights as my week of stillness and meditation has drawn back the curtain to my wandering mind, my habits and distractions. And the world can be in conflict and horror too. Both things can exist, hopefully my own stillness, just like yours, will keep creating more empathy, love, rage, hope and courage.
These old habits, of doing, and being, and self-abandonment, do not go away over night, if you’re a women there’s a chance you’ll spend your whole life revisiting old habits, unhelpful thoughts, harsh criticism and self-neglect.
I know for me, I sometimes wonder why I can’t be ‘like others’ I cannot keep up, I see or maybe presume how busy everyone is, off at events, seeing friends, raising children, rushing about, and I cannot keep up, my body needs silence, pause, rest, time. Maybe it’s from trauma, that I cannot maintain the same fast way of living that others do.
I work a lot, I have to, but I realise after this last illness, that maybe I’m not built of such strong stuff.
This week of silence, I was shown hard truths, the full moon in Virgo(reflecting Pisces) was like a magic spell, while journaling on the moon and writing my list to burn(gosh it burnt FAST under the light of the moon this week) thinking of balance. Why must there always be a second voice, this cannot just be me, I am able to self-reflect and get to know the voice of judgement, but the second voice is one of being alone. My second voice was the voice of doing, ‘you should be doing this’, ‘you could be painting that’ etc etc… This voice of distraction, of safety, or security of fear. It wasn’t until my most valuable asset, my voice, went, that I stopped and that second voice grew quiet.
I had to sit down today, to write. I hope you have got something from my reflections and honest sharing. I tend to keep my own journey quiet and private, and even as I press the publish button, I fear this article is too overindulgent and sounds too morose. But this is what I have to share at the minute.
I believe, stopping, truly stopping, can be uncomfortable, eye-opening, and emotional. But my goodness, it is liberating. Freedom lies within our thoughts, but in order to even get close, we need to stop, and rest.
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