This week, I lost my voice. Because I had to be silent, I was able to hear.
Week 2- Sacred Ache: A Becoming Real Workshop
All of us are (always) in the Workshop: The Workshop of enduring what we did not ask for but here it is. The Workshop of how the hell am I sick again?
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What happens if I don’t have anything to say? What if before I speak, I wait - listening for what else is speaking? What if as I listen - I am not waiting to be filled with an idea, with guidance, with cleverness? What is it to sit - empty inside, without the expectation that I will be filled?
No end goal. Only empty. A cup that is not expecting to be filled by some steaming cosmic teapot. A mind that is resting and quiet, thoughts moving through like clouds across an open sky.
This week, I lost my voice. Because I had to be silent, I was able to hear. But first, before I heard - I had to feel. Vulnerable. Silenced. Angry. Alone.
Everything hurt. Bones, hip joints, fingers and toes. Everything burned. Fever, headache, the buzzing in my head that made it hard to hear my husband when he was standing right beside me.
As I burned, I listened.
Sometimes, often, I have to be stopped in my rush to the next thing. If I don’t stop myself with meditation and daily practice, I will be stopped by illness. I know this and yet I just don’t stop.
“I cannot believe I am sick again!” I railed (with no voice) tears streaming down my cheeks. Oh, yes, I can be very dramatic.
Subscribers will find this week’s module below, with prompts for your weekend journaling and reflection. You are welcome to join the workshop—and the conversation with me and others from around the world.
This workshop is built around the realizations I experience in Walking with Shekinah.
In the opening of that story, I stood on a hill, remembering a student who longed for a more essential teaching. Her longing and my own were reflections of the same search.
"If only I could silence the humming inside. The persistent and anxious buzz that kept whispering: Something is missing. In me. In the world."
Our inquiry this week is this:
What if the very premise of our searching is an error? What if nothing is missing—in you, in me, or in the world? What, then, would we have to accept? If the world is exactly as it is meant to be, what is required of us?
What if the answer is: nothing? Nothing missing—so nothing is required.
What a question!!
A teacher of teachers came to me one day. She called me to the side of her own workshop and asked me a question. It was burning in her eyes. “What does God want from me?”
The answer came instantly—swelling inside me before I could think. I did not hear it with my ears or see it in my mind. I felt it move—rising from some deep center, a belly-heart seat where a voice uncoiled and spoke through me before I could swallow it down.
"God doesn’t want anything from you—or from me, or from anyone. God is already perfect. We are not here to complete some cosmic puzzle. We are not here to live up to some hero’s journey so that we might earn our place in heaven. All of that is man-made thinking, and it has done so much harm to our tender hearts."
It was God that answered her, I knew—even as the words poured through me. And yet, I also knew: the one speaking was me.
Life is in charge. We can fight it and be miserable or surrender to it and laugh at our own arrogance and ideas of what should be. ~Gangaji
I have been thinking about silence these last weeks—since the inauguration, since the overwhelming, devastating news pouring over our heads from the so-called seat of power in the U.S. Thinking about what I should do or say. So of course I lost my voice. This is not a linear sort of logic. I am not sick because the new president stole my voice from me—though, honestly, what a metaphor, no?
I am not sick because I am so furious I could spit. Not because I ache for all the people already being harmed by this man’s foolish policies. Not because of what is happening in Washington. I am sick alongside all of that.
What if there is no reason for this sickness? What if there is no cosmic reason for this president? What if we did not summon this to teach ourselves a lesson? What if it just is? How then do I meet what is happening — in my country? In my body? Can I bring, even this, into the silence with me? What happens then?
All of us are (always) in the Workshop: The Workshop of enduring what we did not ask for but here it is. The Workshop of how the hell am I sick again?
The Workshop of allowing, with much less resistance, the things that are not exactly as we think they should be.
What if, instead of saving the world today, I sit here on the sofa eating this bowl of steel cut oatmeal with tiny diced apples and cinnamon?
Then, what?
Journal Prompt 1: What are you arguing with today? What do you think might happen if you just set it down? Extra credit: Set it down and see.
My encounter in the orchard, with the whispering presence of the divine feminine cascading around me suggests that silence is not absence but presence. With our eyes open to what is actually here, we are suddenly, mysteriously no longer in exile.
"What we miss in all the books and in that story is that, as we are exiled from the house of that father, we enter the benevolent generosity of the mother. The ever-present support and nourishment of the mother."
Exploring the notion of Eden as a metaphor for the world we live in now—if only we could see it—offers a profound reframe for silence. Rather than exile, silence is the invitation back into the garden, back into real presence.
"I believe that Eden is the world we live in now. Once we have eyes to see her."
Journal Prompt 2: What if this world, as it is, is already the Garden of Eden? Freely given, abundant and lush with beauty? This world - not an imagined ‘other, better place’. This world, with the current president and the virus that silences us and makes us cough.
In the essay, my imagined student confesses: “I’m scared that I’d have to change. I’d have to quit… What if the gods can see me? I mean, really see me?” This fear of being seen—of silence exposing us—is powerful.
"What if an angel or a goddess or a spirit animal guides me to give up the addiction, the keeping up, the pretending?"
Journal Prompt 3: What might the silence reveal to you? What might silence see if you let it see you? Extra credit: Let silence see you. Write a conversation where silence tells you who and what you really are.
The essay ends with cascading synchronicities—deer, blossoms, shattered vessels—all woven together in Shekinah’s presence. This points to silence not just as a neutral space, but as the container for divine wisdom.
"In every encounter I have ever had with Grace, with Shekinah, there is always this kind of sweet punctuation mark, a link of symmetry or symbol, to tell me: this is real."
This week, consider:
What if silence is not indifferent, but alive? What if it is Shekinah, the wombspace of the Mother, the one who has been with us all along? What happens if you stop listening for something else — and instead simply listen to what is already here?
What is already here?
This week, step into the silence.
Go outside. Take a few steps away from your back door imagining that you are stepping into the silence.
Rather than thinking of silence as ‘stepping away’ from life, recognize it as stepping into something else. What is here? If silence is a space, what is it like in there?
What might it be to live inside of this kind of Eden. This silence that is speaking and listening to you. This holding that is surrounding and supporting you.
I can’t wait to connect with you about this week’s module. To share your experience:
Meet me in the comments. Simply click on the title and you’ll pop right over to where you need to be. Scroll down and join me in the comments at the bottom of the page.
Meet me in the Notes, over here.
I will see you there.
xxoo
Amy
