The Silent Treatment

By a quiet mind I mean a mental consciousness within which sees thoughts arrive to it and move about but does not itself feel that it is thinking or identifying itself with the thoughts or call them its own.--Sri Aurobindo

The mental noise that is stress, the whirring of the mind machine, grinds away all day and through many people’s nights as well. If you look closely, you can see how this grinding is slowly working you through the pepper mill of existence until you are left with a mere dusting of what once was a whole human being. The tragic irony has been that in an attempt to take care of our stress we send in more noise. We think about our stressful thoughts, we worry about our worries and we even complain about our complaints. Taoist teachers refer to this as putting a new head on top of the one you already have, and contrary to poplar myth, two heads are not better than one.

If you want to see progress in shifting from your old relationship with stress to a new and improved one, then practice cutting off the lifeblood of noise that stress needs to live on. Am I telling you to simply "Shut up and get over it?" Would that help you? If so, then yes, I am telling you to shut up. The getting over it part will actually take care of itself if you can get to the state that the Buddhists refer to a "noble silence." Noble silence is simply being quiet and aware at the same time. This is contrary to what most of us do when we say that we are relaxing. Hanging suspended from a rope cot, while cool summer breezes blow across the lawn is not relaxing if the whole time your mind is ruminating on all the things you should be doing, if you brain is desperately trying to figure out how to you are going to be able to retire before the age of 80 so that you can start relaxing like this in exotic places.

To experience noble silence is to give attention to the space between the noises in your head. What I am calling the silent treatment is to enter into this meditative state minus the incense, new age music and long bearded guru—not that these things are bad. When you tune into the silent moments of your life, you will discover that stress has no home there. More to the point, stress is transformed into its basic structure of a vibrational energy that, despite your effort to get it moving out of your life, is still lodged deep in your psyche. By withdrawing your inner dialogue, you immediately impact this energy charge. Without its noise juice, stress loses its story. This is the power of the silent treatment—the ability to end the narrative of a life that always has you on the losing end.

"No fight, no blame," says the Tao Te Ching, No thoughts, no stress, say I. Eventually, when you reconnect the mouth/brain cable, you will find the urge, desire and even need to say something. More than likely, however, it will not have the same urgent quality to it and you may find that on second thought—really no thought—you don’t say anything after all. This deep wisdom was beautifully summed up in the story of The Little Prince, when he tells his friend that just before he leaves him he will not say anything because "words are often the source of misunderstandings." I could go on about the silent treatment, but I think I have said enough.