Americans seeking relief from hectic daily lives are increasingly exploring a tactic monks and nuns and others have practiced for millennia: being quiet and listening.
Leaders from a variety of religious traditions — including Buddhism, Catholicism, Jainism and Judaism — said they are seeing a surge in demand for their silent retreats, in many cases from people who don’t identify with a particular religion.
Some of these spiritual seekers are weary from technology, stressed by their jobs or dealing with grief. The retreats themselves vary in length and style. Yet several retreat leaders offered the same explanation for the uptick in interest: It is a reaction to the upheaval caused by the coronavirus pandemic.
“Since covid, every available space is booked,” said Father Guerric Heckel, a monk at Mepkin Abbey, a Trappist monastery in Moncks Corner, South Carolina.
Its spartan accommodations in the muggy Lowcountry don’t include internet or television.
“People are attracted here who want to go deeper,” Heckel said.
Robbie Rettmer, executive director of the Drala Mountain Center, a Tibetan Buddhist retreat in Colorado, said a silent retreat she attended last month stood out because she didn’t see the usual moments of distraction or giggling.
“People just wanted that quiet,” she said. “I’d never experienced something like that.”
When Drala surveyed its members this summer, 46 percent — 108 people — said they wanted silent retreats, second in popularity only to classes on Buddhist principles, Rettmer said. The center now holds at least one silent retreat each month.
Statistics on silent retreats’ popularity are hard to come by. But a wide-ranging survey of U.S. religious life released in February by the Pew Research Center found that roughly 1 in 5 Americans meditates at least once a week for spiritual reasons. That includes 16 percent of those who described their religious identity as “nothing in particular.”
“I hear a hunger for silence, a hunger for reflection,” said Sister Anne McCarthy, a Catholic nun who runs a monthly silent retreat on behalf of her monastery, the Benedictine Sisters of Erie in Pennsylvania.
The Erie sisters have hosted their ecumenical “Stillpoint” retreats since the 1980s, drawing on Catholic and Buddhist meditative traditions. Attendance has risen in the last couple years from 15 to 20 people a month to 28 last month, McCarthy said, with more young people opting to unplug for the four-hour sessions.
“They don’t have an experience of silence,” she added. “And when they get a little experience, they want more.”
That was the case for Brittlee McClung. A self-described “high-strung anxious person,” she attended her first Stillpoint retreat in August after a few months of regular meditation.
“It feels like a little rebellion to just sit and be,” said McClung, 37, a mother of two children, ages 3 and 12.
The retreat began with participants sitting on chairs arranged in a circle facing an unscented candle. For 20 minutes, McClung and the others sat in silence, until the ding of a sound bowl indicated it was time for 20 minutes of walking meditation.
The retreat continued with alternating periods of sitting, walking and standing — all silent. Participants were told to avoid nonverbal communication such as a nod or a wave hello.
“You don’t feel that pressure to smile and acknowledge people,” said McClung, who identifies as spiritual rather than religious. “Everyone’s in their own little world.”
Yet just being around others engaged in the same practice made those four hours of meditation easier, she added.
For some, the experience is life-altering.
Jay Butler first attended a silent retreat at Mepkin Abbey in South Carolina in 2002 because he felt something was missing in his life. He had been going to church, but was questioning his faith in God. Then on his third day of the retreat, while silently wandering the grounds, he said he felt a spiritual presence that made him a believer again.
Butler, now a 68-year-old retired attorney living in Raleigh, North Carolina, returns to the abbey every year to recenter.
“For some reason it’s way easier to enter into the silence at a monastery for me,” he said.
Many of the people embracing silent retreats are exploring spirituality outside of the religious tradition in which they were raised.
At the Siddhayatan Tirth — a Jain-Hindu monastery in rural Windom, Texas — about 60 percent of the silent retreat attendees who identify as not religious were raised Christian, said Sadhvi Siddhali Shree, a monk and spiritual director there. Siddhayatan began offering a guided, five-day silent retreat in March to meet the demand after previously offering silence in a solo, two-day package, she said.
It has proved to be popular with “truly everyday people that really want to get away and find themselves, be in a natural environment, be far away from the city, have that opportunity to find their soul,” Siddhali Shree said.
The practice of silence, known as “moun,” is a key part of meditation in Jainism. “We hurt people intentionally or unintentionally [with] our words,” she said. “You can be more mindful to observe because you’re quiet. It helps you to learn to pause before acting.”
Sitting for long periods in silence is not always comfortable, but it is valuable, said Marilyn Kaman, president of the board of directors for the Hokyoji Zen Practice Community in Eitzen, Minnesota.
“Your back is bound to get sore, your neck is bound to get sore,” said Kaman, who has been a Zen Buddhist for 20 years. “Instead of adjusting your posture, the idea is to look at the pain and get through.”
Hokyoji — which sits at the border of Minnesota, Iowa and Wisconsin — offers its quiet contemplative space to those of other faiths or no faith at all. About 210 people visit a year, split evenly between Buddhist and nonreligious events.
The silent retreat phenomenon has also spread to religions without closely held monastic traditions.
Since 1999, the Institute for Jewish Spirituality in Philadelphia has promoted mindfulness, including meditation, in a Jewish context. Interest in its resources and classes have soared since the pandemic, said Rabbi Jordan Bendat-Appell, a core faculty member.
Nine years ago, the institute began a weekly Zoom meditation that regularly drew 30 to 40 people. That Zoom call expanded to five days a week during covid and still regularly draws 200 participants from across the globe.
Similarly, IJS retreats would normally sell 50 to 60 tickets before the pandemic, with some available to buy the day of the event. But the group’s first post-pandemic retreat, in November in New York, sold out around June. Thirty people are on the waiting list for the 100-person event.
“Mindfulness isn’t Jewish or Buddhist or Christian,” Bendat-Appell said. “It’s human. It flows from having a human life.”
This article originally appeared on The Washington Post.
