A Conversation About Silence & Thomas Merton on The Methods Podcast

It was so much fun to sit down and chat with Jory Pryor on the Methods Podcast. We discussed everything from Iowa, to COVID-19 and quarantine, to monks, to silence, to practices, to (you guessed it) a whole lot of Thomas Merton, and more…

Listen to our chat on iTunes: apple.co/3aL9pnq

Listen on Google. • Listen on Stitcher.

“There is a pervasive form of contemporary violence to which the idealist most easily succumbs: activism and overwork. The rush and pressure of modern life are a form, perhaps the most common form, of its innate violence. To allow oneself to be carried away by a multitude of conflicting concerns, to surrender to too many demands, to commit oneself to too many projects, to want to help everyone in everything, is to succumb to violence. The frenzy of our activism neutralizes our work for peace. It destroys our own inner capacity for peace. It destroys the fruitfulness of our own work, because it kills the root of inner wisdom which makes work fruitful.”

––Thomas Merton, Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander

“There are times, then, when in order to keep ourselves in existence at all we simply have to sit back for a while and do nothing. And for a person who has let themself be drawn completely out of themself by their activity, nothing is more difficult than to sit still and rest, doing nothing at all. The very act of resting is the hardest and most courageous act they can perform: and often it is quite beyond their power. We must first recover the possession of our own being before we can act wisely or taste any experience in its human reality.”

––Thomas Merton, Thoughts in Solitude (genderless language my alteration)

Listen to the staircase visualization exercise I shared which is adapted by my friend Joanna Penn Cooper created by psychologist and yoga teacher Jasmine Ti:
https://apple.co/2YeQezH

Enjoy my work? Become a Patron.