Learning from silence: Pico Iyer on the transformative power of solitude

Produced and written by Andrea Brody

“I'm comfortable with being alone, as not everybody is, author Pico Iyer tells us. “But I think the most important thing is just being able to hear something wiser, wider, and deeper than yourself. So it doesn't have to involve going to a hermitage. Take a long walk today and leave your cell phone behind. Just give yourself over to what's around you and bigger than you. Something good will happen.” Graphic courtesy of Rommel Alcantara/KCRW

Over thirty years ago, author Pico Iyer was displaced from his  Santa Barbara home by a wildfire. Looking for a temporary shelter and a place to retreat for a while, Iyer fled north to Big Sur. There he found solace at a secluded Benedictine hermitage offering a peaceful, monastic environment for $30 a night.  

The moment Pico Iyer arrived at the secluded hermitage, something shifted.

“The silence was pulsing,” he recalls. Sitting in the small monastic cell, he felt a profound release. “Finally I was out of my head and I was brought back to my senses. Little Pico, with his many constant and agitated thoughts, was down on the highway and I was welcomed into a much vaster canvas where I wasn't listening to my head. I was just attending to the rabbit, the great blue ocean in front of me, the poppies, and everything that was growing on the hills around me. I was finally out of my head and back in the world, which is probably where all sense and sanity lie.” 

Iyer — who is not Catholic, Christian, or a monk — reveals how monastic life is far from dominated by dogma and tradition. Mostly the monks work hard to maintain the retreat for others to enjoy and many of them share the same doubts and uncertainties. As Iyer recalls, when asking permission to share details of their conversations for his book one monk responded with this: 

“What's precious about us is our brokenness, our woundedness, our hurts, the fact that we're human. So please stress, as much as possible, the times when we're living in doubt and uncertainty. [Don’t] just give us this romantic vision of a monk sitting on a mountaintop above it all. A monk is actually in the thick of it all.”

Iyer also shares some grounding wisdom from other monastics he’s encountered, including the Dalai Lama and singer/songwriter Leonard Cohen. Cohen, “who had done everything possible in the way of enjoying the many seductions of the world,” at the age of 61 chose to become a monk for five and a half years — shoveling snow, scrubbing floors, and leading an incredibly tough life.”   

“[Cohen’s] greatest gift was for silence and I think that's essentially what he gained from his years in the monastery. His monastic name was Jikan, which means the silence between two thoughts. He was a connoisseur and a caretaker of silence.”

Iyer has made over a hundred retreats, living with monks and absorbing their wisdom, questions, and acceptance. He explains that the monks use the term "recollection" to describe how, at some level, we all sense that conventional success won’t bring lasting happiness. “Silence and solitude,” Iyer imparts, allow him to recollect what truly matters and “to follow joy and more conventional notions of success that I had trained myself to follow for many years.” 


Iyer, pictured here, says: “Thanks to the forest fire and the fact [that] I was kind of homeless for a while – there I was. It's really become my secret home for 33 years and across more than 100 retreats now.” Photo by Dick Shapton


“Aflame; Learning from Silence.”

Credits

Producer:

Andrea Brody