Into the Silent Land retreat at Launde Abbey

“We are built for contemplation… Communion with God in the silence of the heart is a God-given capacity, like the rhododendron’s capacity to flower, the fledglings for flight, and the child’s for self-forgetful abandon and joy.”

With these words, Martin Laird begins his classic book Into the Silent Land: The Practice of Contemplation – widely recognised as one of the best introductions to meditation in the Christian tradition written in generations. He brings together an engaging introduction to the Christian contemplative tradition for people inside or on the margins of the churches who feel drawn to the world of silent prayer.

Martin Laird shows how silence and meditation can offer a remedy to many contemporary dilemmas and emotional struggles. Writing with great clarity, poetic depth and authority, Laird examines central meditative methods and traditions found within contemplative prayer. Exploring the role of breath in the spiritual life and the nature of awareness – so often associated in the minds of many with other spiritual traditions – he shows that this is also an ancient concern of Christian thinkers.

How do we enter the “Silent Land” of Divine presence? “By the silence of surrender,” says Laird: “The contemplative discipline of meditation…is not a technique but a surrendering of deeply held resistances that allows the sacred within to gradually reveal itself as a simple, fundamental fact.”

“The more we realise we are one with God the more we become ourselves, just as we are, just as we were created to be. The Creator is outpouring love, the creation, the love outpoured.”

In this experiential retreat, we will explore the essential skills and wisdom of the art of meditation as set out in ‘Into the Silent Land’, including:

• Cultivating gentle concentration (attentiveness) and the opening of awareness
• The subtle challenges of stilling the mind and the interior skills to meet them
• How our deepening silence reveals “the overflowing vastness” of our deepest identity in God
• Becoming windows of light and places of peace for the world