Silence is the Medicine

Oh, and Radical Willingness

Me, circa 2000, realizing my whole life was a lie.

This week, I read several essays, watched a TikTok, and a YouTube video all claiming that women need a separate spiritual path than the ones laid down by male-dominated religions. Those practices were designed to help men stop dominating, so they can diminish or surrender their ego. They don’t suit women, the argument goes, because we already spend our lives in selfless service. Instead, we need to build our egos. And I guess this post is my response to all of that.

I can see some truth in this claim. I grew up in a culture that emulated Roman Stoicism, which was then overlaid with a Calvinist terror of death. The ideal, dating back to Thucydides and repeated by Plutarch, was that a woman should be so silent that her passing from this world would go largely unnoticed. So, after centuries of selfless, invisible service, women must do the opposite of those male-dominated disciplines: learn to say no and mean it, stand up for ourselves and others, and build our ego. All of that, I’ve had to do, but it wasn’t the end. It wasn’t even the middle.

The truth is, the ego will solidify around any story. I am unworthy is just as strong an ego position as I am the dictator, and just as hard to see your way out of. And unworthiness is not limited to women, and neither is the compulsion to dominate limited to men. The truth is that we are born into a culture, already formed, already compelling, already dictating what will happen from way before the doctor holds us upside-down by the ankles and swats that slimy butt. For half of us, that culture is only willing to tolerate our presence if it can profit from our unpaid labor. Misogyny is hatred.

But it’s not easy to walk through this world for anyone. Who would choose to be Pete Hegseth?

It’s just much harder for a person with a privileged life to wake up than it is for someone like me who didn’t have a choice. Well, I guess I could have chosen to die. I certainly thought about it and made gestures in that direction. But I saw what my father did and blamed him for a lack of courage. Sigh. Though I was being far too literal, my suicidal ideation was on the right track. You do have to die, and who would choose that if they were comfortable? Something, something, something about rich men and a camel passing through the eye of a needle…

Still, silence and radical willingness can cut through even the thickest coatings of privilege that clog the mind with the fear of loss, which is only one version of the great animating fear, the fear of death. Have you ever noticed how your fears tend to materialize as circumstances, allowing you to see them? It’s called projection.

When the fear of death cult has political power, what happens is judicial murder—looking at you, Puritan ancestors. All our religions, institutions, courts, politics, and our ethnic and familial cultures are centered around controlling the chaos created by the fear of death.

Here’s a funny thing: chaos engulfs us anyway. Here’s another funny thing: a genuine spiritual practice will take you directly to the heart of your fear rather than help you control, avoid, or ignore it. One more funny thing is that even if you refuse to look at your fear of death for a lifetime, you’ll end up having a heart-to-heart with her anyway, unless you opt out through dementia. Even then, the anxiety (and chaos) is through the roof as it becomes increasingly impossible to ignore the fact that death is the next developmental milestone. Those suffering dementia just channel their death anxiety into the belief that everyone is trying to steal their credit cards or sneak into their house to kill them.

I’m not saying that Alzheimer’s isn’t a real, terrible, debilitating physical condition. It is. But surely we can see parallels to the irrational way we all hallucinate stories we are certain are true, but aren’t. It’s just that our delusions are a lot more logical and socially acceptable before we lose the ability to read social cues and rationalize. Talk to someone of the opposite political persuasion for five minutes, and you’ll see what I mean.

When I landed at rock bottom, it wasn’t around drinking or drugs like it is for so many, though I excelled at those things. It was around the trauma that happened when my father died. Every terrible thing was encapsulated in that moment, especially the terror of death, and the realization that suffering could be so excruciating, you would do anything to escape it. The image of that day compacted under pressure, smaller and smaller, until it fit into the marrow of a hip bone, waiting for the moment in about 12 years, when it would explode and change everything.

Blamo.

That slow-motion atomic blast reached back and forward simultaneously - back through all the decades of horrible familial history, then further back through all of Western patriarchal domination, and forward to all the terrible unfolding that would come in the decades of long-term radiation poisoning.

In the meantime, I went about the business of trying to find a father replacement in the form of a boyfriend I could fuse with so I could live the whole death-moment again, because you know, once simply isn’t enough. Something like that must be replayed like sports highlights. The Father with a Thousand Faces. When the last one left, he recreated my father’s death in such excruciating synchronistic detail that I could no longer blame the boyfriends. The serial killer was inside me. Synchronicity is a sword with two edges.

Here’s the thing that set me free: the deep silence of my soul and the radical willingness to do what it was prompting.

So, the questions became: What is this world, and who am I within it?

Silence and willingness are the answer. It’s not any of the complicated spiritual practices, 12-step programs, churches, mosques, or temples. It’s not your therapist, your sponsor, or your guru, or that class about belief systems you are taking or teaching. It’s not the male model of ascetic ego relinquishment. Neither is it the feminine building of a sense of self that allows you to say: No, and claim your voice and your right to exist and protect yourself. It also isn’t the physical disciplines, such as yoga, walking meditation, bodybuilding, or ritual dance. You know, the “copes.” It’s not grueling meditation practices with postures, mudras, and pranayama. It’s not the ability to see your own grasping mind, or the ability to pick through the vomitus of your childhood to find the genesis of your trauma. It is not learning to create something in the world like prosperity or abundance: “Change your thinking, change your life!” It’s all of those and none of them.

In the course of unraveling my wounding, my worldview, and chasing my longing for freedom, I have stopped at all of the places mentioned above, sometimes for years. So, I can tell you: I am not mocking. But none of these places was anything more than a stop off, necessary at that moment, essential even. I’m not discounting the value of any of it. But it’s not the end. Even the pathless path into the wilderness is not the end.

Much to my surprise, after decades of longing to transcend this world, to be “in the world but not of it,” I have become increasingly political because human suffering matters. Because now, for me, it’s about the larger culture, which is causing terrible suffering. You can’t heal the individual in isolation. You can’t even heal their families in isolation. Culture is the collective ego, and it is undergoing a messy process - right now. Culture is not just a component of the world we can’t change, and must therefore work around. It mediates our experience of being here, and it comes through us - as us.

And all the violence of my parents? The drunken brawls, his need to dominate her, and her refusal to submit through all the countless nights of domestic terror and psychiatric hospitalizations against her will? All of this occurred within the context of a cultural depression exacerbated by the demands of the Women’s Movement, the Civil Rights Movement, and the Farm Workers' Movement, which were unfolding simultaneously. White patriarchal culture had a heart attack that we are still dying from.

I remember my mother, a small white woman bobbing in a sea of whiteness, from small-town New England, boycotting iceberg lettuce and table grapes. I remember her singing “We Shall Overcome” at my father, who slapped her mouth for doing it. And I remember All in the Family, and the way Archie Bunker blew us apart with its portrayal of my father’s prejudices, which were the prejudices of the culture writ large. You can’t take my family’s problems out of the culture we swam through.

We are not really individuals. Instead, we spring from a rhizome, or the root system of an aspen forest, or we fruited from a huge mycelium. More truthfully, we are one individual with many bodies.

When my life exploded all over my future, I still thought my problems were my own. I had to heal myself because no other family was as shameful as mine. For many years, I thought I was doing just that. Then, I finally realized: I am healed; I am joyous. And that was true, but attached to it was: I am so lucky. I was still thinking of myself as an individual.

It’s good to be healed, I won't deny that. Most of the time, I am beaming joy and gratitude for my life and all its past problems. As the great Maya Angelou says, “I wouldn’t take nothing for my journey now.” But I wouldn’t want to live through it again, either.

Because here’s the thing. It’s a surrender. You cannot dictate the terms of your own healing. That is both the good and bad news. The programs you need, the spiritual disciplines, communities, the practices that are centuries old, and those custom-made by you, will show up. You’ll be attracted to whatever is next. Those teachers will take you to the limit of that gift for your specific set of needs, and then you move on. No community, practice, or teacher has the whole answer, or has transcended the human condition. Instead, we are called to go deeper into the human condition with all the love we have embodied.

I hold out the possibility of a handful of saints per generation, such as Ramana Maharshi or Ammaji, but that’s it. Most of us are called to wake up within the world. The next phase of healing comes, and then it dissolves into something else. It’s all medicine, and if you stay too long, it’s all poison, too.

The one thing that can be universally depended upon is silence. Silence is the rich love that surrounds us all the time, like clear water we fish can’t see. Silence is intelligent.

The only spiritual discipline I have practiced, which was beyond the ability of human beings to pollute or co-opt, was the silent retreat, even though my teacher slept with a student and blew up the sangha. But the real teacher wasn’t that man, I’m not talking about arduous meditation techniques or belief systems—none of that. I learned a lot from fasting, from being vegetarian, and other disciplines, but they are not necessary—simple silence without any religious mythology will do it. Put down your phone. Detach from all your platforms. Stop talking, stop writing, stop listening to music, stop processing your emotions. Stop everything.

Most people won’t go anywhere near that. They lean in and whisper, “But don’t you go crazy?”

“You do,” I tell them, all knowing smiles and teasing. “It’s every bit as bad as you fear. Your mind goes absolutely bonkers for about 60% of however long the retreat is. Then you break through the noise, almost as though a glass box around you shatters and falls at your feet. Then, there is nothing but space, and the space is full of all the attributes of the divine: joy, beauty, gratitude - you name it. Space actively loves you. Then, perhaps for the first time in your life, you are sane.”

You can go on retreat with a teacher and sit in satsang twice a day, where people discuss what is coming up for them. Still, the other 22 hours loom large. But even satsang takes place in silence. That’s what I did. My experience of satsang was that any of us could sit in the teacher's chair, because the real teacher was silence. It spoke through everyone. Or you can go by yourself - into the wild, as they say. You can do this in nature or at home, although some environments are more conducive than others. A retreat can last anywhere from a few hours to several days or even longer. Then you reengage. One meditation can be a retreat.

Once I had completed the bulk of my personal healing and re-membered myself, my attention turned to the spiritual practice of art, for it isn’t enough to heal an individual, though it helps enormously. When art is the devotion, culture is the devotee. Culture is the patient.

You don’t need me to tell you we are insane - our spiritual malaise has Christians threatening bloody civil war, cheering concentration camps, unmarked, illegal contractors grabbing people off the streets and throwing them into unmarked vans with out-of-state licence plates - no warrant, no badge, no face. Heartlessness is exploding the federal deficit for no gain, and the collateral damage of millions losing their healthcare with the glib: “Well, we are all going to die.” What the actual fuck, Joni.

Here’s the piece I’m just beginning to understand as I delve deeper into art as a spiritual practice. Once you have stepped off the spiritual path, then, off the pathless path, the work you do is no longer about you. It’s not that I never hit a wall within myself or an old story that holds me back. No. It’s that when I come up against that, I know how to suffer it and let it go. Now, the call is to become a grand mother - meaning big, meaning mother to everyone.

The call is to love the culture, to insist that we heal and do better, to midwife us through this crisis. When I was in the deep woods of healing my personal trauma, it looked every bit as bad as our political situation looks now. But this is an opportunity to heal from all the pain and suffering caused by millennia of patriarchal domination as the answer to the fear of death.

Since we cannot possibly know what to do, we can only surrender to silence in the radical willingness to do whatever we are called to do, to follow the invisible music and dance the steps we do not understand. But I know, from decades of practice, that we can trust what we surrender to in the silence. It knows what to do next, and next, and next. Whatever you are called to, that is the thing. Even if you are a woman called to practice an ancient spiritual discipline created by men for men. Do it with full commitment and joy, but only until it’s time to move on.

I’d love to know what your experience of all this is. It’s so huge, I’m sure there are many. Please, drop a comment below.