A Monk told me to shut up, then laughed

Reflection on screaming in the silence and silencing the suffering within.

'The screaming you hear is your stress' .. I had an old monk chuckle this to me thirty some-odd years ago in a class. He followed up with, something like 'Stress is easy to manage, I don't know why there's all these books and courses ... just shut up!' He got a kick out of his own words.

I've held onto this lesson like a jeweled-charm found in the woods you don't wanna tell nobody about since then. It's really hard though.

Living is hard, and loud. Isn't it?

We barely ever hear the scream of stress, we sure talk about it all the time .. and that's the problem, read that sentence again.

We're always listening for something else, talking to someone else, ambient traffic in your head or simply sopping and rotting into digital sedentary babble for absolutely no reason ... It breaks us all day, every day, all night, every night. Because of it, we can't hear.

It takes enormous work to find complete silence, and when we do, it's really really reeeeally hard to properly be still and match it. Even in the woods ... nature is wonderful, but it's brutally loud, a perfectly wild symphony, an entirely different conversation. It ain't silence though.

This weekend I dipped up to the Catskills for the day to sit in the Holy Cross Monastery, hunting silence. Found myself deep into the crypt, among a century of those passed and prayed over daily in this silence, into extreme, exquisite silence.

And as expected, I was smacked in both ears within minutes, the screaming of my own anxiety, resonance of raging emotions, pounding of a broke heart and sinful spirit, shame, grief, noise, noise, noise ... until it's gone, and when I simply 'shut up' like the old man said.

Thank you Brother Timothy.

I know you'll never read this, but thank you.