REMEDY: Contemplation Practice for Week One

Silence and Solitude

Preparation

You may wish to prepare yourself for this time of contemplation by:

• Making sure your attention is not required by anything else. For example, not driving a car, crossing a street, talking with someone else
• Consider finding a quiet place where you’re not likely to be interrupted. Awareness and attention are fleeting, jumping from one thing to another and one thought to another. So, a quiet place with few distractions seems to work best.
• Eliminate as many visual stimuli as possible as they tend to distract and draw our attention away.
• Use a timer to help you keep track of time

Practice
We are accustomed to think of Scripture as the revelation of God. And so it is. We want now to discover the revelation that silence brings. To take in the revelation that Scripture offers, you must expose yourself to Scripture. To take in the revelation that silence offers you must first attain silence.

• Take a comfortable posture.
• Close your eyes.
• Try and attain stillness and silence of body and mind for a period of ten minutes.
• At the end of ten minutes, open your eyes.

Share with us online (if you wish), what you did and what you experienced in these ten minutes. Tell us what attempts you made to attain silence and how successful you attempts were. Describe this silence if you can. Tell us what you experienced in this silence. Tell us anything you thought and felt during this exercise.

The experience of people who attempt this exercise is infinitely varied. Most people discover, to their surprise, that silence is something they are simply not accustomed to. That no matter what they do they cannot still the constant wandering of their mind or quieten an emotional turmoil they feel within their heart. Others feel themselves approaching the frontiers of silence. Then they panic and withdraw. Silence can be a frightening experience.

-adapted from Anthony De Mello by R. Martoia