I then decided to write some new brief essays based on the book as well. I've also decided to post what I write on the blog. It most likely will be slowly and overtime. So, here's the Proglogue:
Into the Silence
Prologue
It came to me in meditation that possibly what I am talking about here could be named The Great Silence, the breathing, “silent” heart of everything. It also occurred to me that there are different types or kinds of silence. There is human silence, where we don’t say anything. There is the silence inside of us where it is possible to hide away things that we don’t want to see or think about. I saw an image during this same meditation where I was extremely overweight and was saying Nooooo to losing more weight. (I have had a weight issue on and off since I was about 8 or 9 years old.) I was able to talk to this piece of myself about how I/we didn’t need to hide anything behind weight anymore.
Yes, silence as humans define it can help us enter into The Great Silence (“the Silence”). But, I believe that you can reach the Silence through ecstatic dance and through practices such as chanting, drumming and Kirtan (a Hindu practice involving call and response singing). We can engage with silence through many means. Sara Maitland in her book, The Book of Silence, writes about the different ways that she engaged with silence as she began to crave silence more and more. Silence can be found by being alone on an island and not talking with anyone. It can be found in Quaker meeting, by sitting on a rock on a hillside. But, is this engaging with the Silence? Possibly. I believe entering into the Silence can have different gateways for everyone. I like the term gateway that I read about in Sally Kempton’s book, Meditation for the Love of It. She says that everyone has a different gateway for entering into meditation, and that, in fact, it can vary for someone over time what that gateway is.
We can also engage with the Silence in different ways, or possibly it would be better to describe it entering into it to different levels. I can almost see the Silence as a territory such that we can circumnavigate it. We can tap lightly on its border or step shyly past it. Or, when we feel bold we can plunge deeply into it. Sometimes it happens when you aren’t even thinking about the Silence. I have had meditations where I have “woken” up wondering where I have been.
I confess that I sometimes enter into the Silence, yet many times I don’t. I know that many could be asking how can I, then, write a book about entering the Silence? This book arises out of my previous book, Opening the Heart: Meditations on How to Be. That is a book that contains meditation sayings on photographs of plants in part 1, expanded text on those sayings in Part 2, and some exercises you can do in Part 3 of the book. Much, if not all, of Opening the Heart was channeled from my angels and guides.
This book has been, in a sense, brewing for a number of years. A number of people in the metaphysical business have looked at me and told me that I have one or more books to write. I mentioned to one of them, Patti Pingree, that I was writing poems based on the meditation images. She gifted me with the title Into the Silence.
I originally thought that this book would only be poetry. But, I was gifted with the idea just before I started writing this book that it should be new “essays” on the meditation sayings as well as the poetry. This is how the form of the book came into being. It is also, to a great extent, inspired by or channeled from my angels and guides. And, that’s how someone who is not a master at meditation comes to write this book.
I hope that it helps you on your journey.
©2019 Kathryn Samuelson
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The first image is from my book, Opening the Heart: Meditations on How to Be. The second is a photograph by Kristina Flour that I found on unsplash.com
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