16th December, 2022
Cynthia Bourgeault, Centering Prayer and Inner Awakening (Cowley Publications, 2004), 9.
Image: antislavery.org/reports-and-resources/
The short quote in the image above is taken from today's longer quotation, below, in Cynthia Bourgeault's, Centering Prayer and Inner Awakening (Cowley Publications, 2004), 9. You can read more about this book by clicking here.
'There is an outer silence, an outer stopping of words and busy-ness, but there is also a much more challenging interior silence, where the inner talking stops as well. Most of us are familiar with this first kind of silence, although we don’t get enough of it in our spiritual nurture. It’s the kind of silence that we normally practice in retreat times and quiet days; sometimes you’ll hear it described as ‘free silence’. With a break from the usual hurly-burly of your life, you have time to draw inward and allow your mind to meander … allowing the tranquility of the setting and the relative quieting of external pressures to bring you more deeply in touch with yourself. You listen carefully to how you’re feeling, what you’re wishing. In this kind of work, the free association of your mind provides the key to the renewal, and silence furnishes the backdrop where this work can go on.
But there is another kind of silence as well, far less familiar to most Christians. In this other kind of silence, the drill is exactly the opposite. In free silence, you encourage your mind to float where it will; in this other, sometimes called ‘intentional silence’, a deliberate effort is made to restrain the wandering of the mind, either by slowing down the thought process itself or by developing a means of detaching oneself from it.
Intentional silence almost always feels like work. It doesn’t come naturally to most people, and there is in fact considerable resistance raised from the mind itself. Dealing with this internal resistance is an inevitable part of developing a practice: ninety percent of the trick in successfully establishing a practice lies in wanting to do it in the first place.'
'There is an outer silence, an outer stopping of words and busy-ness, but there is also a much more challenging interior silence, where the inner talking stops as well. Most of us are familiar with this first kind of silence, although we don’t get enough of it in our spiritual nurture. It’s the kind of silence that we normally practice in retreat times and quiet days; sometimes you’ll hear it described as ‘free silence’. With a break from the usual hurly-burly of your life, you have time to draw inward and allow your mind to meander … allowing the tranquility of the setting and the relative quieting of external pressures to bring you more deeply in touch with yourself. You listen carefully to how you’re feeling, what you’re wishing. In this kind of work, the free association of your mind provides the key to the renewal, and silence furnishes the backdrop where this work can go on.
But there is another kind of silence as well, far less familiar to most Christians. In this other kind of silence, the drill is exactly the opposite. In free silence, you encourage your mind to float where it will; in this other, sometimes called ‘intentional silence’, a deliberate effort is made to restrain the wandering of the mind, either by slowing down the thought process itself or by developing a means of detaching oneself from it.
Intentional silence almost always feels like work. It doesn’t come naturally to most people, and there is in fact considerable resistance raised from the mind itself. Dealing with this internal resistance is an inevitable part of developing a practice: ninety percent of the trick in successfully establishing a practice lies in wanting to do it in the first place.'