Observing the Silence

Because mindfulness is a contemplative practice, it values simplicity and non-distraction. By extension, it holds silence in high regard. It is widely accepted that environments conducive to mindfulness practice are ones that keep the clamour and noise of everyday life at a distance. Classes, training courses and retreat centres tend to prioritise relative quietness. The rest of the time, however, just like everyone else, practitioners inhabit a busy world of human interactivity. This is where the practice gets ‘real’ and ‘interesting’ because we are obliged to engage and respond, to speak and to act. If our practice is in good shape, we will find ourselves reflecting on the causes and the effects of our speech and our actions.

Image courtesy of Michael Leunig

At a recent conference of healthcare professionals, which was themed around mindfulness ‘in troubled times’, I was impressed by how a congregation of over a hundred people in one room were able to navigate a packed programme of talks and workshops with poise and geniality. Most of what was spoken and shared throughout the day had a purposeful, kindly quality to it. During interludes, a natural respect for each other’s space seemed to flow. The harmonious vibe was noted by some of my colleagues. I recalled one of the more subtle and under regarded mindfulness practices: noticing the absence of something. Here, it was the absence of friction and antagonism. It had a pleasant feeling tone. It was easy to linger with. As I developed this practice further and the day unfolded, something else came into awareness, something troubling: what wasn’t being said.

Wellbeing Agenda

It can be tricky to notice absence. Minds in their default state get so hijacked by what is going on that it takes skill and effort to notice what’s not going on. This was true for me at the conference. Amidst all the announcements, speeches, discussions and PowerPoint presentations, it was hard to tune into anything else. Most of the time, my interest in what someone was saying occupied my whole attention. 

At other times, I was able to sit back and take in the experience more widely and deeply. What came into awareness was often unremarkable, such as familiar ways of talking about mindfulness-based interventions in clinical care, a general enthusiasm from delegates for the latest scientific evidence, and a pervasive interest in recent innovations. But when a “wellbeing expert” gave a lengthy presentation about “surviving and thriving in challenging times”, something else stood out, conspicuous in its absence: the lack of any reference to social, economic or political conditions. Not a single mention! For her, mindfulness was exclusively about individual wellbeing and your capacity to “slow down and get in touch with yourself [and] focus on what you can control.” Even by the questionable standards of contemporary mindfulness, this total lack of context, not to mention the total lack of interest in context, was striking.

Inactive Service

Later, during a Q&A session, context did get a mention, briefly, but again in a troubling way. The panel of speakers on stage was asked for their thoughts on the relationship between mindfulness and social activism – a subject of deep and abiding relevance to many practitioners. After a moment’s hesitation, when nobody seemed quite sure what to say, one member of the panel, who is a leading figure in the mindfulness field, responded. He reminded us of the customary links that clinical applications make between mindfulness and human action. More impressively, he made a passing reference to a standout example of the ‘troubled times’ we live in: the appalling slaughter and forced starvation of the people of Gaza that amounts to ethnic cleansing and genocide. But just when it seemed like he might declare a clear, definite and proactive role for mindfulness in social activism, he paused and folded, concluding meekly with the suggestion that we might like to consider writing thank you letters to activists. 

The implications of his response didn’t hit me straightaway. Gratitude, after all, is commonplace in the mindfulness world. Its practice is often combined with mindfulness on training courses. In this sense, his answer was befitting of an expert committed to existing frameworks of practice. It was also the kind of answer you might get from a Buddhist monastic, who is obliged by their ethical precepts to not participate directly in many kinds of social and political activity (western mindfulness has a tendency to echo its Buddhist roots in clumsy ways – this might have been the case here).

But here we were, a roomful of active citizens, not a monk or a nun in sight, sharing a day devoted to mindfulness in troubled times, and being told by a senior authority figure that the appropriate limits of our civic responsibility was to write appreciative emails. For him, the scope of mindfulness practice does not extend beyond personal, indirect action. Notice the implicit passivity in his message: don’t personally stand up for anything; don’t foster awareness of the social context of distress; don’t directly challenge or confront power structures that cause harm; do thank others for committing themselves in the service of peace, justice and compassion, but stop short of doing that yourself. And then what? Congratulate yourself for having “done your bit”?

Hush in the Room

Bear in mind the context of these remarks. They came after specific reference to the situation in Gaza and they were made to a large gathering of healthcare professionals. Some of the conference delegates are part of a large-scale, non-violent movement calling for a ceasefire in Gaza, an end to their country’s arm sales to Israel, and support for boycott, divestment and sanctions against that state as a way of forcing it to comply with international law. 

Why? For important reasons hopefully you know already, but also because health workers, hospitals and the delivery of medical supplies have been repeated targets for the Israeli military. Countless health workers have been killed. Therefore, healthcare professionals worldwide stand in solidarity with their fellow workers. They also stand with all the people of Gaza who are being relentlessly persecuted in the most cruel and brutal of ways. They speak out for peace, justice and compassion. They participate in protests to raise awareness about the situation in Gaza. They engage in collective, direct action. It works. It matters. It is also a simple expression of the ethical dimension of mindfulness practice.

The conference speaker appeared oblivious to all of this. He didn’t seem to understand how he was promoting passivity and retreat in the name of mindfulness. He seemed unaware of the way in which he had brought up Gaza and simultaneously cast it aside. His unintentional disregard for the lived reality of the people who live there could be heard in everything he didn’t say. Did he know how his comments landed in the room? I doubt it. I’m not sure I know myself. Because nobody said anything, including me. We all chose silence.

Disturbing the Peace

Some experiences become more poignant with the passing of time. What was said and what went unsaid at the conference, especially in the handful of minutes described above, stayed with me long after. My own silence at the time did too. I think they point unsurely at some of the blind spots of modern mindfulness – ones that carry the potential for more confusion if not brought into awareness. Confusion is no bad thing. It can be a prompt for renewed curiosity and investigation that leads to understanding.

One of my favourite stories about silence – apocryphal and from the Gestalt Therapy tradition – concerns a sound engineer at a radio station who, for her private use, makes compilations of excerpts from random interviews that have already been broadcast. The excerpts are not the words of interviewers and interviewees, but the soundless spaces between the words – the pauses before a person speaks and the breathing spaces after someone has spoken. The engineer has many of these compilations, all completely silent, and she enjoys listening to them in her leisure time. For her, each compilation is unique, rich and intriguing. Because there are many kinds of silence and she can hear them all. 

If it paid proper attention to itself, what might the world of mindfulness learn from its many silences? Perhaps, for starters, that they’re not all the same. That silence itself is not inherently virtuous. That some silences can be complicit with the worst of human deeds. That sometimes silences need to be broken. That way, the world of mindfulness might learn how to better discriminate between ennobling silences and ignorant ones, respectful silences and indulgent ones, engaging silences and avoidant ones. Mindfulness practitioners, as much as anyone else, need to recognise such distinctions in order to safeguard against slides into indifference.

What might the world of mindfulness learn about how to better navigate ‘troubled times’? Perhaps, for starters, that mindfulness and collective, direct action are complementary, not mutually exclusive, no matter what the ‘experts’ might say. That troubled times require stepping outside the boundaries of self-interest and personal wellbeing, and deploying our mindfulness skills in active service to others. That the mental quality named ‘mindfulness’ is ethically sensitive and recollective in nature, which means that to ‘be mindful’ also requires learning the lessons of history. In regards to Gaza, that means understanding, as the novelist-journalist Omar El Akkad reminds us, that “no society in human history has ever donated or applauded its way out of a genocide.” The same can be said for writing thank you letters.

Such are the ways that the world of mindfulness could spare itself the ignorance and shame of becoming a silent witness to the unfolding crime scenes of history, only to realise, much too late, all the things that should have been done. To be able to see through the filters of political deception and media manipulation to the deeper questions about our humanity is a type of insight practice. In the case of Gaza, this requires practitioners to not deflect away from what is happening there, like the speaker did at the conference, but to stay with that, to care about it, and to act. Otherwise, all we're left with is a terrible silence, not a mindful one. What happens for those who choose the latter is articulated by El Akkad:

“The gears will grind to a halt one day, and the silence that waits then, for those who commended this killing and for those who said nothing, will be of a far more burrowing kind… It will take the form of previous statements quietly deleted, previous opinions abandoned and replaced with shiny new ones about how, yes, it was such a terrible thing that happened. And finally, it will take the form of a quiet unheard reckoning in the winter of life between the one who said nothing, did nothing, and their own soul. And there will be no words exchanged then, only a knowing” (One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This, Omar El Akkad, 2025).

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