Silence

Silence has special relevance to me.   At the age of nine I had a bicycle accident and suffered many injuries, the worst being a broken jaw.   The doctors explained that for my jaw to heal it would have to be “wired shut”.   That was all they said.  Then they silenced me, for six weeks.   Being made mute was haunting and traumatic beyond words.  (couldn’t resist.) 

Imposed silence, or being silenced as I was, to anyone is a trauma but all the more so for a young child.  Over the years I have tried to make sense of that trauma, reaching and searching and hoping to find ways to integrate and process it and learn how being silenced affected me.    As an educator, I turned to Jung, Piaget, Erikson, Kohlberg and Gilligan and a few others to try to help me understand the probable psychological, cognitive, social, moral and relational effects that the accident had on me at that stage of my development.   As a yogini, I turned to the system of yogic breath work called pranayama, to help me deal with and undo the physical effect of not being able to open my mouth for six weeks.   And finally, and most intriguing to me as a spiritual seeker, I looked at silence through the lens of much self-reflection and soul searching.

After all my searching, I have learned that the imposed silence that I suffered is the shadow side of a very beautiful and rich silence, a positive place that has the potential to create something from nothingness.  Choosing silence versus being silenced or stumbling upon it, can be healing, expansive, and instructive.  Being silenced, on the other hand, is crippling, belittling, constricting, and disempowering. (LeClaire, 2009, 84, 88.)

As an adult in mid-life and no longer a scared, traumatized nine-year-old, silence is a very much welcomed part of my life.  As an educator and mother of four, I have embraced silence as a wonderful place, a beautiful space offering a meaningful and nurturing opportunity.  Silence has become my friend and I look at it with awe and admiration.  I see it as a vehicle of richness, a place of depth and value.  An incubator where creativity can be nourished and birthed.  It is a perfect and optimal environment for nurturing and fostering creative expression.  


It is in the emptiness of silence that I have come to see vastness.......