I won’t speak to anybody for one year

What happens if you stop talking for a year?

In India, there is a meditative practice called “Vipassana” where participants go without speaking even a single word for days.

I've attended one such session and stayed absolutely silent for 5 days. Here's what I experienced:

You have to remind yourself constantly for the first day to simply keep your mouth shut physically. This looks and feels very awkward but you soon get over it.

Since I was at a meditation centre, I had no access to my phone, the internet or television. The organizers encourage you to think about your life, all of it! Recall every memory. Despite how many years you've lived, most participants could recall their entire lives in a day - that's how fleeting a single human life is.

You sleep a lot as a way of passing the time. But this doesn't work for more than a few days because once you're well rested, you just can't force yourself to sleep.

You become more attuned to sound. When not constantly listening to people speak, you begin to notice sounds in nature, tactile sounds of things like cutlery and even the sound of your own breathing.

You get much better at reading and speaking through body language. Eye contact, facial expressions, shrugs, hand gestures. You start to tune them to convey messages and in time, you can almost “hear” a person's body language from a distance.

But perhaps the most surprising outcome is when you're given the freedom to speak again, you almost don't want to. You realise you have nothing that needs to be said urgently.

When you do speak again, your ears don't fully recognize your own voice. It's a feeling similar to hearing an audio playback of your voice - you question if this is what you sound like to everyone else and it feels a bit odd.


Source: https://www.quora.com/What-happens-i...ing-for-a-year