Why silent retreats

During your time of silence and reflection, you may experience a spirituality that can give you a sense of calm and a sense of purpose. Some people see having a higher power as giving them something to belong to that is stronger than themselves. Spirituality is not necessarily religion. A spiritual person has a connectedness to a higher power, to the universe, without necessarily being a religious person. Your way of practicing spirituality is an individual choice and may include prayer, mindfulness, or meditation.

One of the key benefits of a silent retreat is the time for meditation. Practicing mindfulness and meditation have been proven as ways to improve addiction treatment outcomes. As Dr. Living in the present moment and focusing on the now, not the future or the past, helps to center and focus thoughts while reducing stress and anxiety.

In addiction recovery, coping skills are critical. In a silent retreat, you can take time out of your busy day as a working professional and focus on you.

Being still and quiet in a busy, commotion-filled world helps you find ways to overcome your addictive behaviors and move forward with a productive, healthier life. Focusing on your spiritual growth can help you connect more fully to other people and to a higher purpose. Spiritual growth embodies values such as trust, faith, respect, self-expression, and self-acceptance that are needed in your life as you move through your addiction recovery. Considering no talking is a primary tenet of silent retreats, that means parting ways with your phone.

Without the constant stream of distractions in the form of impossibly long text threads and ever-changing social feeds, you may find yourself more focused and more deeply connected to your fellow practitioners—even without talking to them. The concentration and efficiency afforded by a digital detox will likely extend beyond your retreat, too.

Several studies back up the connection between silent meditation and mindfulness, while other research suggests mindfulness can boost immune system health, benefit people with insomnia, and improve quality of life.

By turning inward through silence, you may be faced with some uncomfortable thoughts and feelings. Prolonged silence can help you better process and manage negative thoughts and teach you to stop reacting to negative sensations—both during the retreat and long after. One study that compared the effects of a seven-day silent meditation retreat on the brain function of practised meditators and people who did not regularly meditate found that non-meditators had reduced activation in certain regions of the brain.

They interpreted this result as increased brain efficiency. As our mental and emotional lives calm down, our bodies relax. Silence allows for a heightened sense of intimacy with the world. In sustained silence our senses become more acute, and both the inner and outer world can appear to us with greater clarity. For example, we may begin to notice the birdsong we previously failed to hear, or we may tune in to our quieter thoughts, which normally get drowned out.

The primary reason for silence on meditation retreats is to support our meditation practice. Silence helps keep our focus on cultivating mindfulness and concentration. The complex interplay of emotions and attitudes involved in most social interactions tend to keep the mind too active and scattered to allow for deep concentration.

And this internal activity often lingers. The mental momentum from a conversation is seldom finished when we stop talking. It can take a while for the thinking mind to quiet down after a conversation ends. Maybe, ever.

Without words, we showed care and concern for each other. We built fires. We shared blankets. We made tea. It all sounds very banal, but it was inexplicably deep.

I still miss them, even though, in total, we spoke to each other for all of one hour. Honestly, at the end of five days, I could have thrown my phone into the ocean and never thought about it again. From deep within the retreat, my enslavement to technology—and specifically, my tiny iPhone—seemed bizarre. Why did I give it the power to disrupt my peace or destroy my focus at any given moment? What's more, connecting superficially with hundreds of people on Instagram suddenly seemed far less powerful than connecting with a few people, deeply , in the real world.

Connecting superficially with hundreds of people on Instagram suddenly seemed far less powerful than connecting with a few people, deeply, in the real world.