An ongoing love affair with meditation

I wasn't drawn to meditation to find calm.

I was drawn because something in me was hungry. Not for answers exactly, but for a kind of intimacy I couldn’t name yet. I was seeking the answer to the question "Who Am I?"

Meditation became a love affair slowly, then all at once.

At first it was discipline. Structure. Cushions, bells, long sits where my knees hurt and my mind ran riot.

And also if I’m honest it was peak experiences. Waves of love so intoxicating. States of bliss that made everything seem resolved. Moments where the sense of self softened or disappeared and what remained felt boundless, intimate, profoundly good. I was young enough to romanticise the struggle to believe that if I just sat longer, tried harder, dissolved more, I might arrive somewhere final. Some enlightened place where the self fell away and peace stayed.

I also began to discover an identity I didn’t know I was hungry for: being good at meditation. The one who could sit longer, go deeper, touch the sublime. The quiet pride of devotion. The subtle reinforcement that love and belonging came through transcendence. I believed I could simply bypass the human experience by sitting, closing my eyes and dissolving into love, bliss and ecsstasy.

And yet, even then, silence was already teaching me something else.

That even the most beautiful states pass. That bliss, too, is an experience, arising, dissolving. That love cannot be held as an identity.

That what I was looking for was not elsewhere.

Facilitating retreats, ten years ago

When I first began facilitating silent retreats over a decade ago, I held silence with a certain reverence — and a certain rigidity.

I loved teaching even then. I loved speaking about practice, guiding others into stillness, watching people touch something true in themselves. Teaching gave shape to my devotion; it gave the love somewhere to flow. Silence as container. Silence as discipline. Silence as a map for awakening.

I believed in its power deeply. I still do.

But back then, meditation didn't move my anger or grief or shame.

I trusted the ecstatic more than the ordinary. I trusted awakening experiences more than the slow, humbling work of relationship. Relationship with the body, with emotion, with the human heart that does not stay open just because awareness is vast. I trusted transcendence more than embodiment. I spoke fluently about non‑duality, about no‑self, emptiness, awareness and yet my nervous system was still learning how to rest and to feel power. How to feel safe inside the ordinary, messy aliveness of being human.

Silence revealed vastness, yes. Spaciousness. Insight.

It also revealed how subtly we can bypass the heart.

Becoming a parent changed everything

Parenthood rearranged my practice completely. I could access that same bliss or long formal mediatations. I birthed in COVID. Cared for my parent with chronic illness.

No peak experience prepares you for loving someone you cannot transcend. No amount of bliss dissolves the daily reckoning of care, responsibility, exhaustion and depletion.

There was no longer the same luxury of long, uninterrupted silence. Meditation moved off the cushion and into the kitchen, the car, the night wakings, the raw tenderness of loving a child while being pushed to my edges.

What I could no longer transcend, I had to include.

Silence stopped being something I entered and became something I learned to listen for. Underneath the noise, inside the body, right in the middle of relationship. My meditation became less about stillness and more about honesty.

As a parent, silence showed me where I was bracing. Where love frightened me. Where my heart closed in the face of exhaustion, responsibility, and the grief of losing who I once was.

It softened me.

It broke me open.

Facilitating now: a different kind of silence

The way I facilitate silent retreats now is very different and my love for teaching has not diminished. If anything, it has deepened.

I teach less from experience and more from walking beside others. Less from what I know and more from what I am willing to stay with, alongside others.

Silence is no longer something I impose, it’s something I trust. I trust the intelligence of the body. The wisdom of resistance. The places where silence doesn’t feel peaceful but alive, charged, sometimes uncomfortable.

I’m less interested in peak experiences, though I honour them, and the truth they reveal and more interested in integration. Less focused on transcendence and more devoted to presence.

Silence reveals what we are already carrying.

For some, it reveals grief. For others, restlessness. For many, a deep tenderness they’ve never had time to feel.

And underneath all of it, always, the spiritual heart.

The spiritual heart and non‑duality

When I speak of the spiritual heart, I mean the living centre where awareness and love are not separate. It is spoken about in all traditions.

Non‑duality, as I’ve come to understand it, is not the absence of self, it’s the absence of separation. Not a disappearance of the human, but its full inclusion. Thought, sensation, emotion, relationship... all arising within the same field of belonging.

Silence doesn’t take us away from life.

It returns us to it.

It reveals how much of our suffering comes from subtle resistance, from tightening against what is here, from trying to manage experience rather than meet it.

In silence, the heart learns how to stay.

What silence reveals

Silence reveals how busy we are inside.

It reveals the strategies we use to stay in control. It reveals our longing... for rest, for love, for permission to be exactly as we are.

And, slowly, it reveals something simpler and more radical:

That nothing essential is missing.

That awareness is already intimate. That love is not something we generate, but something we remember.

This is why I keep returning to silence. Why I continue to offer retreats.

Not because silence is easy. But because it is honest.

And because, over time, it teaches us how to live....

with open eyes, open hands, and a heart that knows how to belong to this life.