Learning from Silence: Lessons from Over 100 Retreats

by Pico Iyer

From the bestselling author of The Art of Stillness, a revelatory exploration of the abiding clarity and calm to be found in quiet retreat

Pico Iyer has made more than one hundred retreats over the past three decades to a small Benedictine hermitage high above the sea in Big Sur, California. He’s not a Christian—or a member of any religious group—but his life has been transformed by these periods of time spent in silence. That silence reminds him of what is essential and awakens a joy that nothing can efface. It’s not just freedom from distraction and noise and it’s a reminder of some deeper truths he misplaced along the way.

In Learning From Silence, Iyer connects with inner stillness and joy in his many seasons at the monastery, even as his life is going through constant a house burns down, a parent dies, a daughter is diagnosed with cancer. He shares the revelations he experiences, alongside wisdom from other nonmonastics who have learned from adversity and inwardness. And most profoundly, he shows how solitude can be a training in community and companionship. In so doing, he offers a unique outsider’s view of monastic life—and of a group of selfless souls who have dedicated their days to ensuring there’s a space for quiet and recollection that’s open to us all.

Radiant, intimate, and gripping, Learning From Silence offers ageless counsel about the power of silence and what it can teach us about how to live, how to love, and, ultimately, how to die.

Genres: Nonfiction

219 pages, Kindle Edition

Published February 6, 2025

About the author

Pico Iyer is a British-born essayist and novelist of Indian descent. As an acclaimed travel writer, he began his career documenting a neglected aspect of travel -- the sometimes surreal disconnect between local tradition and imported global pop culture. Since then, he has written ten books, exploring also the cultural consequences of isolation, whether writing about the exiled spiritual leaders of Tibet or the embargoed society of Cuba.

Iyer’s latest focus is on yet another overlooked aspect of travel: how can it help us regain our sense of stillness and focus in a world where our devices and digital networks increasing distract us? As he says: "Almost everybody I know has this sense of overdosing on information and getting dizzy living at post-human speeds. Nearly everybody I know does something to try to remove herself to clear her head and to have enough time and space to think. ... All of us instinctively feel that something inside us is crying out for more spaciousness and stillness to offset the exhilarations of this movement and the fun and diversion of the modern world."

Reviews

[Chandar · Rating 4 out of 5]

Pico Iyer is based in Japan but spends a lot of time in California, and across several cities of the world as a writer. Now it turns out that he also spends a considerable amount of time in an incredible Camaldolese monastery in Big Sur, California -more than hundred visits over three decades! This book is a collection of his reminiscences of those visits, and how the total freedom, overwhelming silence and beauty of the place amidst minimalist living conditions has given him so much. Peace when troubled, strength when weak, clarity when confused and connectedness when alone. "WHEN ONE KEEPS QUIET, the situation becomes clear."

[Fran Cormack · Rating 5 out of 5]

Such a mesmerising book. I could go back to the beginning and listen again ❤️

[Vidya · Rating 4 out of 5]

After hearing a TED Talk by Pico Iyer titled “Where is Home”, I filed Pico Iyer away as a person to follow. And more recently, I came across the book Learning from Silence, and I knew I had to read it.

The book is structured into five sections, and within each are small chapters that narrate the deep philosophical insights the writer gains during the several visits made to the New Camaldoli Hermitage in California. These insights are delivered as declarative sentences, and one has to glean their poignant meaning through their own experience. There is not much context or explanation offered, which helps retain the brevity and simplicity of the whole thing and forces the reader to think and reflect. It reminds me of another book called Notes to Myself by Hugh Prather, which is another good book to have in your library.

The language Pico Iyer uses paints a gentle, beautiful, and layered portrait of the moments when the writer gained these nuggets of wisdom. The quotes from great philosophers like Thoreau or Emerson lend to the sheen of the writer’s own realisations. Some lines that stayed with me long after I turned the page:

“I can see how luxury is defined by all you don’t need to long for”

“The point of being here is not to get anything done; only to see what might be worth doing”

It is not a book to rush through, it is one to return to. A book not to finish, but to fold into your life.

I would rate it a 4 out of 5.

[Peter Mitchell · Rating 4 out of 5]

This isn’t a book to read in a conventional way. It feels more like a series of meditations or moods than a narrative, each one quietly slipping past the thinking mind into deeper, more holistic layers of being.

If you are looking for a “story” with a beginning, middle, and end, you will be sorely disappointed. This is more like entering the flow of a river and allowing yourself to be carried—open-ended, spacious, and unfolding as Pico flows.

My first encounter with Pico Iyer was Video Night in Kathmandu, which I read just after returning from Nepal. That book helped catalyse my own spiritual search. Learning from Silence feels like a deepening of that journey—an invitation to pause, to notice the spaces between words, and to discover that our truest self is found not in motion, but in silence.

[Sujith Ravindran · Rating 5 out of 5]

The world grows ever louder, noise piling upon noise, until it seems that only those who shout can only survive.

In Learning from Silence, Pico Iyer offers a luminous meditation on silence, stillness, and the wisdom that waits in the hush. Deeply philosophical and poetic, symphony of thought whispered in the language of the soul. A. joy to read.

"Best in us lies deeper than our words" - Pico Iyer

[MountainAshleah · Rating 3 out of 5]

Audio. I'm not sure what I think of this memoir as I was able to hear about half of the spoken words. Iyer is a very good writer, but a terrible narrator. His voice is too soft and the words slide together. I couldn't understand him on any of my four devices for listening to audiobooks-- that's definitely a first time. Maybe I'll locate the book in the library and actually read it, as the topic is one of my favorites.

[Donna · Rating 5 out of 5]

A beautiful, lyrical, contemplative book:
‘The grace of this place is that it makes me see everything as I might a loved one when asleep. At peace in that rare space where, as Master Eckhart has it, “one has not been wounded.”’
Pico Iyer

[Preethi · Rating 4 out of 5]

Picked this up out of loyalty to Iyer. Beautiful prose, the experiences themselves are awesome too. But the book is passable.

[Aarti · Rating 5 out of 5]

I thoroughly enjoyed and felt like “lived” at the hermitage with Pico as I kept reading, what felt like his personal diary. I could imagine the mountains, the lush landscape, the silence, and practice just- being. I enjoyed the experience of reading this.