It’s been three days since my 21-day silence and "do nothing" retreat ended. I’m still integrating what I experienced… I might be integrating for a lifetime actually! Or maybe more than a lifetime?…
I decided to share parts of this very personal experience I recently had. The reason being that the content of what came up during these 21 very special days was mainly related to my project: Heartkemy.
Why retreat to Silence?
To give you a little bit of context, I'll explain what I did exactly. This is not the first time I’ve done this kind of retreat, so I have some experience from a few years ago. I like to do these retreats whenever I am standing on the doorstep of a major change in my life.
The way I organized this retreat was by finding a small cabin in the woods where I could be exclusively for myself for the entire time. The main principle of this kind of retreat being to not do anything, I had to reduce all my needs to the very essential minimum. I didn't have to cook, turned off my phone, didn't have any books to read and even didn’t do any of my daily meditation or yoga practices. My days, were not much more than eating, drinking, sleeping, sitting. A lot of sitting.
Being in the woods, I was not only surrounded by nature, I was with Nature. As this happened during late spring, in the south of France, the very life force of all plants and animals was palpable. I contemplated flowers and lost myself in the ever repeating songs of birds. I heard so many kinds of birds, I almost felt as if I was in the rainforest. The repetition of these sounds was hypnotic and sometimes even boring. It’s crazy to think that such beautiful and pleasing sounds can become annoying because of their never ending repetition!
This extraordinary context literally opened my sixth sense. I felt my state of consciousness shift into what I call Listening (with a capital L). Connected to her through my heart, I was able to hear Mother Nature herself. A cohesive phenomenon unfolded: Gaia shared her wisdom, and my mind connected the dots.
The gift of creating inner space: a flood of insights from the subconscious
I still can’t believe the amount and depth of insights and ideas I got during those days. It was so immense that I almost felt like I was going insane! The most challenging part was my commitment to staying until the end of the 21 days. All I wanted was to express, create, make, build, and manifest all those brilliant creative ideas!
Before the retreat, I was questioning myself about many aspects related to my tattooing, art, alchemy, and travel project. If you don't know much about my vision, check the older blog post that I wrote back in September. I was very uncertain of how I would manage to shift from my old profession of software engineer, to this new artistic and nomadic lifestyle. This all became clear to me while I was living in that cabin.
After living a very busy daily life, I suddenly shifted to having nothing to do at all. It only took a few days for the symbolic dam to break, releasing a flood of creative energy that had been trapped by my never-ending doing.
My main concern was finding my style as an artist and having enough ideas and inspiration to create a portfolio that would unlock the possibility of getting an apprenticeship with another tattoo artist. Now, I have more inspiration for visual art than I could ever dream of! And all those big challenges I had to overcome? They don’t look so big anymore. I was surprised to reach a point where I saw nothing left to resolve, accompanied by a deep sense of peace and satisfaction.
I won't go into the details of all those ideas, as that is not the point of this blog post. What I can say is that I plan to integrate the "do nothing method" into my alchemical processes of how I will create art in the future.
Listening: the key to creativity and inspiration
Now back to the title of this post. While I already expressed how I had been listening to the bird songs and to Nature, I would like to clarify why I chose this title.
It all boils down to one principle: allowing a deep state of openness where every little detail that is fed to the mind is transmuted and used to connect dots in the big picture of one’s life. The mind receives information thanks to the five senses and all kinds of other perceptions. Alone, the mind will not do much; it will merely classify and label the information. This is what happens in our busy daily lives. When one allows for silence and boredom to peak at such levels, as in the kind of retreat I did, there is space for a new player: the Heart. When this happens, the flow of insights and creative ideas is uninterrupted and tainted of a very pure and clear quality.
I recognize that this is all a bit of a paradox. I planned to go on a silence retreat and ended up with a very talkative inner voice. While creating outer silence, the inner talk was multiplied a thousandfold! Normally, this would not be welcome. People tend to seek inner peace by achieving total stillness. I didn’t get to that point, and even if there was a part of me that wished to reach that joyful state of total stillness, I valued those insights way more than anything else I could have dreamed of.
I want to end with a deep sense of appreciation and gratitude for my Self, for having the courage and trust, to throw myself into this kind of ordeal. Om Shanti Shanti Shanti Om 🙏🏻.
