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Silent meditation involves remaining silent during meditation practice, allowing for a deeper meditative experience. Focusing on the breath is common, and it gained popularity in the late 20th century, leading to the establishment of silent retreat centers.
Rather than being a specific discipline or form of meditation, silent meditation is simply a technique in which one remains silent during meditation practice. Some individuals choose to meditate in silence simply because they find sounds like mantras or music distracting, while others find that silent meditation allows them to access a deeper meditative plane. During silent meditation, it is common practice to focus on the cycle of your breath. The concept of silent meditation gained popularity in Western countries such as the United States in the late 20th century, leading to the establishment of several silent retreat centers.
Silent meditation is a technique that can be applied to many different forms of meditation. As the name suggests, the technique is simply to remain silent during one’s meditation practice. This silence can be observed during individual or group meditations and can last anywhere from a few moments to several days or even weeks, depending largely on the goals and experience level of the individual meditator.
Some individuals choose to meditate in silence simply because they find sounds common to some types of meditation, such as mantras or ambient music, distracting. Others may wish to perform a meditation in a public or semi-public place, such as an office, where the noise would be disturbing to others. Still others find that silent meditation allows them to access a deeper meditative plane.
During silent meditation, it is common practice to focus on the cycle of your breath. In the absence of background noise, it becomes possible to hear the breath as it is drawn in and then released from the body. The breath can then become a focal point, allowing people who meditate to temporarily banish everyday thoughts and worries from their awareness and simply “be.” To facilitate concentration on the passage of the breath and to develop one’s meditative discipline, some meditation experts recommend counting one’s breaths in cycles of 21, starting with one cycle and eventually building up to several.
The concept of silent meditation gained popularity in Western countries such as the United States in the late 20th century, leading to the establishment of several silent retreat centers. Some of these centers are affiliated with a particular religious discipline, such as Buddhism, Hinduism or Christianity, while others are non-denominational. Some centers offer periods of silence combined with other non-silent activities, such as yoga, while others are totally dedicated to silence. Retreats can vary in duration from a few days to a few months.
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