Learning from Silence
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  • Published: 6 February 2025
  • ISBN: 9781804952740
  • Imprint: Penguin
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 240

Learning from Silence

Lessons From More Than 100 Retreats

  • Pico Iyer
Formats & editions
Hardback
13 May 2025
EBook
6 Feb 2025
Audiobook
6 Feb 2025
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Our first time publishing Pico Iyer, we are repositioning him as a New York Times bestselling, major spiritual thinker – with a book that speaks to the growing readership for MBS / wellness

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


Over the past three decades, Pico Iyer has made more than a hundred journeys to a small hermitage high above the sea in Big Sur, California. He's not a Christian, nor a member of any religious group, and yet his life has been transformed by these periods of time spent in silence.

In Learning from Silence, Iyer travels deep into inner stillness and joy in his many seasons at the monastery, even as his life is going through constant change: houses burn, a parent dies, a daughter is diagnosed with cancer. He shares the revelations he experiences, alongside wisdom from other non-monastics who have learned from adversity and inwardness. 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.
  • Published: 6 February 2025
  • ISBN: 9781804952740
  • Imprint: Penguin
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 240
Categories:

Praise for Learning from Silence

Luminous and exquisitely simple, it is astonishing how Iyer transports you into the joy of the mystery. And then, lit with love, he shows you how to find it everywhere

Jack Kornfield

Learning From Silence is an exquisite book, a jewel, a treasure, and appearing at a time when silence can teach us to see more deeply, to love more surely

Joan Halifax

Iyer's beautiful book is for anyone who feels drawn to the pull of monasticism, without adhering to any religion. Iyer masterfully and lyrically shows us how we may need to find a new home - one far more solemn, communal and silent than our present one - in order to return properly to ourselves

Alain de Botton, author of THE ARCHITECTURE OF HAPPINESS

Pico Iyer has been studying sincere practitioners from many religious traditions for a long time and has gathered some of what he’s learned in this book. I trust that reading this book may help many to lead lives of greater compassion and deeper peace of mind

His Holiness the Dalai Lama

A beautifully written, meditative book ... As I turned to this, I felt my blood pressure reducing, and I began to read in a different, slower, and more concentrated way.

Financial Times

In this delicately woven memoir, Iyer combines portraits of the people he has encountered during his stays with crystalline descriptions of the natural setting and philosophical ruminations on the purposes of retreat.

The New Yorker

Essential reading for anyone interested in the monastic tradition and those who follow it.

Kirkus, Starred Review

Brilliantly illuminates philosophical insights about the nature of the self, the world, and how silence serves as a conduit between the two, often in elegant, evocative prose ... Stunning.

Publishers Weekly
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