A vow of silence
By Alice Haddon
At the end of their first night at The Heartbreak Hotel, by vowing not to speak of them for the remainder of the retreat, our guests bid farewell to their heartbreakers. This vow, spoken aloud by each woman in turn is witnessed by the whole group.
You may be curious as to why we would have a vow of silence about the heartbreaker, given that they were the reason these wonderful women came on the retreat in the first place.
Our experience of being around heartbroken women is that it’s extremely difficult to stop talking about the heartbreaker, but there are powerful reasons why it is so important they do. The first is to clear a space - psychologically speaking - so that our guests can begin their journey of re-alignment and the second is to provide an alternative methodology towards recovery. Because searching in vain to understand why the heartbreaker did what they did and why it happened is really a type of emotional avoidance; focussing on the puzzling whys is the mind’s strategy to avoid confronting the real loss, of facing up to the rejection. And it’s a cruel trick because the truth is we may never know why it happened; why they left, or why they had the affair, so it is also futile.
Ultimately, The Heartbreak Hotel retreat is the journey back to ourselves and we can’t have heartbreakers anywhere near that journey. After each woman takes their vow - witnessed by the others - an atmosphere of excitement and hope becomes manifest. A clearing is created - one in which the heartbreaker is no longer present - and a pivotal shift occurs within each woman.
To create your own vow of silence, challenge yourself not to focus on your heartbreaker for ten minutes, or stretch it to an hour, even two. Your mind will inevitably be pulled back to thoughts of them, but commit not to engage in a tug of war with those thoughts, let them pass by like leaves on a stream and think about something else that will distract you from those sticky thoughts, something that takes you back towards yourself.