Some things will not arrive until we stop talking.

Watch what happens in almost any conversation when the talking stops. Three seconds go by. Then four. Somebody laughs a little, or changes the subject, or asks a question nobody needed answered. We are remarkably good at not letting a silence stand.

I have spent a lot of years now sitting with people in rooms where silence is the point — spiritual direction, retreats, bedsides. And the thing I keep learning is this: silence is not the absence of something. It is a presence with its own work to do. There are things it accomplishes that no amount of good language ever will.

Silence is an event, not a gap

The body seems to know this before we do. In a study at the University of Pavia, researchers tracked heart rate and blood pressure while people listened to a sequence of musical tracks, with two-minute silences inserted between them. Slower music was more relaxing than fast, which you would expect. But the deepest drop in heart rate and blood pressure did not come from any of the music. It came during the silent pauses in between (Bernardi et al., 2006). The silence was not a nothing between the somethings. Physiologically, it was the most restorative part of the whole sequence.

There is even a hint that silence builds something. A 2013 study found that mice given two hours a day of near-total quiet showed more new cells maturing into neurons in the hippocampus than mice exposed to music, white noise, or even their own pup calls (Kirste et al., 2013). It was mice, and it did not test memory or humans, so I would not lean on it too hard. But I notice that the one condition the researchers assumed was the control — the empty one, the nothing — turned out to be the one doing the most.

TRY THIS — Two minutes, nothing added

Set a timer for two minutes. Put the phone in another room. Do not put on music, not even the calm kind, and do not give yourself anything to accomplish.

Sit. Let the first wave of restlessness come, because it will, usually around forty seconds. Do not fix it. Just stay until the timer goes.

Afterward, notice one thing: what showed up in you once nothing else was being added?

The season I had no words

There was a season in my life when I had no words. Not fewer words — none.

I would sit and gaze off into the distance for long stretches. The people closest to me kept asking the same question: what is wrong? It was a fair question. But the honest answer was that nothing was wrong. I was simply not in a place to use words. Something in me had gone quiet, and it was not a malfunction. It was a passage.

I know now to call that a liminal space — one of those thresholds where the old way of being has ended and the new one has not arrived yet. At the time I only knew I had nothing to say and no desire to manufacture anything.

Here is what I did not expect. When I came out the other side, I did not go back to how I had talked before. My whole way of communicating had changed. I came out using about a third of the words I used to use.

Silence had not taken something from me. It had taken something out of me.

Why we fill it

We fill silence because it is uncomfortable, and because most of us were trained to believe that helping means saying something. When someone is in pain in front of us, speech feels like action and silence feels like abandonment. So we offer the reassurance, the reframe, the story about our cousin who went through the same thing. Almost always, we are managing our own discomfort and calling it care.

The desert monastics understood the cost of this. They had a word — hesychia, stillness — and they treated it as a discipline rather than a mood. When a young monk came looking for wisdom, Abba Moses did not give him a teaching. He said: go sit in your cell, and your cell will teach you everything. That is a strange kind of answer unless you have discovered that some truths will not be told to you. They have to surface on their own, in conditions quiet enough for them to come up.

The second sentence

Here is the most practical thing I know about silence, and it has changed more conversations for me than any technique. When a person finishes speaking and you do not rush in, they very often say something else. And the second sentence is frequently the true one.

The first sentence is the prepared one — the summary they brought with them, the version they have told before. The second one, the one that only comes if you leave room, is where the actual thing lives. I have watched it happen hundreds of times. People are not withholding. They simply have not reached it yet, and our hurry to respond keeps them from ever getting there.

TRY THIS — The count of three

In your next real conversation, when the other person stops talking, silently count three before you say anything. That is all.

It will feel much longer than three seconds. Resist the urge to nod it away or fill it with “mmm.”

Watch what happens. Often they will keep going — and what comes next will be the part that mattered.

What words could not hold

I have sat with a lot of people who had just lost someone.

Early on I thought my job in that room was to find the right thing to say. I would search for it the whole time I was sitting there — some sentence that would make the loss make sense, or at least make it lighter. I never found one. There is no such sentence. I have looked.

What I learned, slowly and mostly by failing at the other thing, is that words do not help in that room nearly as much as presence does. So now I sit. I do not explain the loss, or locate a meaning in it, or reach for anything about a better place. I sit, and I stay longer than is comfortable, and I let the silence be as large as the thing that happened.

Nobody has ever thanked me for what I said at a time like that. People have thanked me for staying.

Some things are too large for sentences

There is an old strand of theology called the apophatic way, and its claim is bracing: that the most important realities can be more truthfully approached by what we do not say about them than by what we do. Every word we put on something that large also puts a fence around it. Say God is light and you have said something true, and you have also quietly excluded everything light is not.

Grief works the same way. So does awe. So does love, past a certain depth. This is why the worst thing said at a funeral is almost always a sentence, and the best thing is almost always a presence — someone who came, and sat, and did not explain anything. Words divide and define, which is exactly what makes them useful and exactly what makes them too small for some rooms. Silence can hold what language has to cut into pieces.

What Silence Does That Words Cannot Reflection Sheet

An ordinary discipline

None of this requires a monastery. It requires a willingness to be, for a few seconds at a time, less useful than you would like to be. Two minutes with nothing added. Three seconds before you answer. A drive with the radio off. A meal where nobody narrates. These are small, and they are not easy, and they will show you things.

Because the question underneath all of it is not whether silence is pleasant. It is whether there is something trying to reach you that cannot get through the noise — including the noise you are making. There usually is. It has been waiting, patiently, for you to stop talking long enough to hear it.

Peace and every good.

 

About Jim & Lynette Vaive

Jim and Lynette Vaive are the co-founders of spirit of EQ and co-authors of The Mystical Seeker. They are Master Certified Coaches, certified Narrative Enneagram teachers, and Certified Spiritual Directors, and together they hold credentials in Spiritual Emotional Intelligence (SEQ) — a framework rooted in Lynette’s Doctor of Ministry research. Learn more at spiritofeq.com.

Sources

Bernardi, Porta & Sleight (2006) — cardiovascular and respiratory effects of music and silence: Circulation / Heart

Kirste et al. (2013) — “Is silence golden?” hippocampal neurogenesis in mice: PubMed

Abba Moses, The Sayings of the Desert Fathers; the apophatic tradition.