Just another day to go in the retreat, we are almost there. We sit and we stay silent. That is what this is all about. Just sit. Just stay silent. Just.
We are screaming inside our heads. But that doesn't count. What counts is that you sit in silence externally and try to hopefully bring a sense of that silence to the inside. At the least, you don't let it go exploding onto the outside. That is the hope.
I am here. And I am now. We start. But not for long. There are treasure troves of memories. Or mind maps of ideas. Or tragedies and melodramas galore. It is a maze and you don't get to choose. You are pulled in. Or pushed into a scene or a scenario. On good days you play out a comedy. On bad ones, there is tragedy. On worse days, you slide into existential questions. That is how the mind works. Lucky if you even notice it. If you do, that in itself is the path.
So you sit. Fortunately, no one hears the screams inside. But then, there are screams. Real ones. From the other side of the meditation hall.
Those screams are not of pain. Nothing so trivial. Those screams. Pain doesn't even start to understand the trauma that is making her shout her heart out like that. She has no control. It is a scary situation right away for everyone in the hall.
Her voice started slow, with restrained sobs. Hardly noticeable if it were a public space. But this public space is different. Every tiny pin drop is heard, comprehended and wondered about by several dozen minds. Because there is nothing else. So these sobs register right away. Someone is sad, the brain says. A sense of foreboding. This is a vulnerable time to go down that path.
But within a few seconds, probably hours deep within her psyche, it has transformed into uncontrolled, incomprehensible shrieks. Her voice filling the whole room in a high pitched cry of pure terror.
This room has been an asylum for minds trying to be silent for ten days. Voices in whispers if there is ever a need. We are part of the silence by now. So when the screams came, they did not just fill the room with this perceived story of trauma, suffering and even a lament for help. No, the deep melancholy that was the source of this noise took down everyone and everything in that hall with it.
Within no time, I was crying. And I cried well, I tell you that. First, from the pure shock of her trauma and suffering. Then, it descended into all that had been boiling up in my mind for all those days. And my sadness has no names. Buried deep within surface level problems. Hidden in closets and shelves that are hard to reach and out of the way. Conveniently ignored for years. Decades. Not even a memory, these imperfections, or Sankaras as they called it in Sanskrit, have decayed into pure feelings. No form or recognizable events or people or phases in life, it is all just a gravy of things that have gelled together slowly and in secret, into an amalgamation of everything there is to cry about.
There is only one way to clean this bowl. One cries. In that hall, I cried with her. For her sorrows. Not knowing the first thing about her or her sorrows, I kept sobbing, trying to still maintain my silence for the sake of not disturbing my neighbors while the Guru handled her situation. I went outside and sat on a bench to marinate in my misery a bit more. It was a beautiful morning to be terribly sad. Fog all around and sun just about rising on the horizon, and I am brought to a smile, even as I am sobbing, as I think of the surprise he is in for just in the first hour of his day. My eyes ran out of tears and my throat ran out of sobs eventually. Yet the heart would not stop. I just waited and watched it all come out. It slowly turned into hiccups and hitching. Breath finding its place again in the chest. Just settling in a state of melancholy that felt like it would stay there forever. I have to say, I liked it even then. Not every day does one get a chance to clean the slate so thoroughly.
The afternoon came, mindful about vulnerable souls, ready to break at a hint of trouble, and brought back a sense of calm to the meditation hall again. Sort of.
Her wails were not something that would be washed away easily, whatever calm or silence comes along. Those walls will remember those notes of melancholy and desperation for a long time to come. Maybe without a structure. Maybe just becoming a part of the amalgamation of everything that there is to cry about.
1 comment:
This piece captures the strange fullness of silence—the way one person’s breaking can unlock a whole room’s worth of buried feeling. It’s tender, unsettling, and honest about how healing sometimes looks like falling apart together.
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