“All men need enough solitude in their lives to enable the deep inner voice of their own true self to be heard at least occasionally. When that inner voice is not heard, when he cannot attain the spiritual peace which comes from being perfectly at one with his true self, his life is always miserable and exhausting”

—Thomas Merton

A man walks into a monastery. He takes a vow of silence and commits to speaking only two words every seven years. After seven years, the monks summon him and ask him to speak.

"Hard bed," he says. They nod and dismiss him.

Seven years later they summon him again.

"Bad food," he whispers. The monks all nod and wave him out.

Seven more years pass, and they bring him back.

"I quit," he declares.

This time the abbot can’t control himself.

"Oh, big surprise!” he says, "You've done nothing but complain since you got here."

The longest stretches of silence I ever experienced were ten-day Vipassana retreats. For the first few days, you feel disoriented by the lack of human communication. Nobody is talking to you, nor are you talking to others, which means you are no longer spending energy trying to interpret or perform all those endless stories.

At first, you miss the human reinforcement that you do, in fact, exist, but after a week or so you will likely start to enjoy this new, quiet freedom.

Then, you start noticing a new, quieter soundtrack. There’s no TV, music, arguments, podcasts, gossip, ringtones, or keyboard tapping. In their place, there’s a new background hum of birds, insects, wind, streams, leaves, and the gentle shuffle of fellow meditators as they struggle with their positions. 

It’s delicious. It was always there, but you never heard it before, and now it feels like someone turned off the other soundtrack and turned the volume on this one up.

Finally, on top of this soundtrack, there’s a new noise to get used to: your inner voice. It was also always there, of course, chattering away with itself in the background, but you have become an expert at drowning it out with playlists, screen time, and Netflix episodes. 

Now, you have no defense. You are forced to listen to it for around sixteen hours a day, but hopefully, with the gentle guidance you are given each day, you are also learning how to observe it rather than identify with it.

We start asking ourselves a new set of questions about this inner voice. What will we learn from it about ourselves? Will we be able to cope with listening to it, all on our own? And how come we took so many decades to sit down and listen to it finally? What were we afraid of?

And then, for me at least, we start asking this weird new question: Does my inner voice have a volume dial? And if so, what default is it set to?

Before you read on, please try to answer yes or no.

So, it turns out it does—or at least mine does. I didn’t know this until I noticed that my inner voice was practically shouting at me, and I could barely hear the delicious background noise of the meadow outside the room.

For the first time in my life, I wondered idly whether I had a volume dial. I tried to change my inner voice to a whisper instead of full volume, a “3” instead of a “9.” Unbelievably, it worked immediately, and for the rest of the retreat, I was able to observe my thoughts in a softer whisper that was far more enjoyable to listen to.

It was quite a revelation. I always knew that I had the power to move to a quieter place and meditate, but I didn’t know I also had volume control for my inner voice. It made me feel even more in control of my mind than before. I would have never known this if I hadn’t stepped out of daily life to change my soundtrack.

It was another reminder that we can change the volume in our lives to make ourselves feel lighter.

Why don’t we do this more often? Tenzin Palmo, the remarkable British Buddhist nun who lived for eleven years on her own in a cave in India, believes we are afraid: 

“We are afraid of silence—outer silence, inner silence. When there’s no noise going on outside we talk to ourselves—opinions and ideas and judgments and rehashes of what happened yesterday or during our childhood; what he said to me; what I said to him. Our fantasies, our day-dreams, our hopes, our worries, our fears. There is no silence. Our noisy outer world is but a reflection of the noise inside: our incessant need to be occupied, to be doing something.”

– Tenzin Palmo, Into the Heart of Life

Starting to listen to your own voice again feels both delicious and deeply human. You feel you were born to listen attentively to yourself, but somehow, you forgot how to do it and then surrounded yourself with unnecessary noise.

Biologically, this makes sense because we are human apes, just a few hundred generations from a society where the ability to listen to the signals and chatter of the jungle or the savannah would determine whether we would eat or get eaten.

In fact, especially in America, even a few generations ago, people lived right on the frontier between the city and the unknown, between the noise we created and the noise from which we came. It was important to pay close attention to threats from the wilderness.

I often feel this urge to go outdoors and be a listening animal. In nature, even silence seems loud; the quieter you are, the more you can hear.

One reason our family decided to move to Utah was to spend months of the year in the mountains because the easiest place to find total silence is on a mountain alone while it is still snowing. I first experienced it while trekking in Nepal, and I have sought it out ever since. Whether you walk out in the backcountry or up a chairlift on a quiet day, the silence is uniquely deafening. Peter Matthiesen, the enigmatic writer, zen teacher, and onetime CIA agent, captured it beautifully in The Snow Leopard:

Snow mountains, more than sea or sky, serve as a mirror to one’s own true being, utterly still, utterly clear, a void, an Emptiness without life or sound that carries in Itself all life, all sound.

If you don’t have a mountain to hand, an interesting way to explore the experience of sitting silently together might be to attend a Quaker meeting, which take place all over the world. Formally the Religious Society of Friends, the Quakers or ‘Friends’ date back to the English Protestant movements of the 1650s, and offer a very personal and quiet form of worship.

Here’s how they describe their meetings, which are open to all and often held at local meetinghouses on Sunday mornings:

A Quaker meeting is a simple gathering. Because Friends believe that Spirit may reveal itself to anyone, we don’t have priests dispensing grace to a congregation of followers; instead, everyone arrives at the meetinghouse as equals, and seating is usually arranged so everyone faces each other in a square or a circle. Then, in what’s known as an unprogrammed meeting—because anyone could be the instrument through which God (or Spirit, if you prefer) chooses to give a message—everyone sits in silence, usually for an hour, and waits to see if a message comes.

For a more active, transformational experience, many people travel to France and Spain to walk the Camino Way in silence. Pilgrims travel from all corners of the world to silently walk the Way of Saint James, known in Spanish as the Camino de Santiago, the almost 500-mile path from Saint-Jean-Pied-de-Port in France to Santiago de Compostela near the western coast of Spain. 

Apparently, the early pilgrims deliberately traveled slowly, forgoing the use of river barges or horses in favor of their own feet. A pilgrimage from northern Europe to the remains of St James in Santiago could take eight months, with travelers leaving in the spring and returning in the winter. 

It’s now at the very top of my bucket list, and when I walk the Camino Way, I plan to carry the poetry of David Whyte, either in my backpack or my head, and especially this verse:

FOR THE ROAD TO SANTIAGO

For the road to Santiago, 

don’t make new declarations  

about what to bring 

and what to leave behind. 

Bring what you have.

You were always going 

that way anyway,

you were always 

going there all along.

—David Whyte

Controlling our inner volume dial also often helps us with creativity. When we sit alone to create something - perhaps to paint or to write - we need to hear ourselves clearly, and silence creates an empty space that must be filled. As Aristotle understood, nature abhors a vacuum.

Marcel Proust, who gave us ‘A la recherche du temps perdu,’ perhaps the most intimate (and longest!) portrait of an inner voice in all of literature, apparently lined his walls with sound-absorbing cork, closed the drapes, and wore earplugs. He knew that great work comes from great silence.

In all these ways, then, we can choose to turn down the volume and listen. We can switch off our devices, walk silently, find snow, pray, or meditate.

When we take the time to find our own volume dial and then learn to turn it right down, we regain some control over our thoughts and give ourselves the chance to hear again and perhaps, from this quieter place, even to create again.

J. E. Chadwick

If you enjoyed this essay, please share your own thoughts or experiences:

— Have you ever tried to take back control of the volume in your life?

— Do you think your inner voice has a volume dial? Have you ever tried to adjust it?

— Would you like to find new, quieter spaces, and what would you use them for? What would you create?

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