On the evening of Dec. 3, about a hundred or so Occupiers congregated around the steps at the east end of Liberty Plaza for the Occupy Wall Street New York City General Assembly meeting. Now that the nights are cold and the occupation has no permanent home at the park, the assembly meetings have slimmed in size, attracting only the most dedicated occupiers.
And on Saturday night the assembly was silent. The sound of the traffic on Broadway echoed through the plaza as the Christmas light-wrapped trees illuminated the group of occupiers -- some standing, some sitting on the cold granite blocks. For nine minutes they remained in silence together, listening and contemplating.
As someone who has been studying meditation and contemplation throughout my young adulthood, I've developed a deep appreciation for the power of silence and listening. In the Buddhist tradition in which I practice, spending time in silence cultivating mindfulness and compassion is a crucial component of personal well-being and inner harmony.
As an activist, director of a not-for-profit organization, and member of the OWS Meditation Working Group, I also have interest in the effect that silence and contemplation has on group dynamics. If meditation and contemplation can help cultivate inner harmony on an individual level, is there a corollary when the techniques are applied on a group level?
One of the frequent criticisms of the Occupy movement has been that it doesn't have clear goals. In my opinion, that criticism is missing what I feel is actually the core of the movement. It's not just about offering clear goals (of which there are actually many), but on a more basic level, it is simply offering the possibility of something different -- a fresh canvas on which to paint a new image of our social being.
On Saturday Dec. 3, an opportunity arose to investigate how silence could play out on this blank canvas. Myself and several other leaders in contemplative practice communities across the country organized a national day for "Nine Minutes of Silence." The spirit was to create a time and space for Occupy communities to connect to contemplative practice communities through shared silence, contemplation and intention setting. Local groups were to determine the exact time and place of the silence, and how best to integrate with local Occupy groups.
In New York City, our coalition of meditation, prayer and yoga communities decided to begin with a silent march from Foley Square to Zuccotti Park. Nearly 60 folks braved the winter weather to walk, two-by-two, down Broadway behind a placard stating "Peace is an Action, not an Ideal." Walking in silence is not a rare occurrence in New York City, people here do it all the time, but focused silence with a large group is dramatic.
Afterwards, a volunteer photographer for the event noted, "That was a surprisingly moving march. I never thought silence on quiet streets could mean so much."
This moving quality is what I feel is often missing in our busy lives. Silence and focused intentional activity that connects us to our deepest values is nourishing to both ourselves and our community. And this needn't be a "spiritual" endeavor, it's can be as basic as something like brushing your teeth or washing dirty dishes in the sink -- routine maintenance for your mental health.
So being silent is one thing, getting other people to be silent with you is another. It's relatively simple to ask people who already meditate to congregate and be in silence together, but how could one inspire silence in a large gathering of people with unknown backgrounds?
Well... You could always just ask.
And after our silent marchers arrived at Zuccotti Park on Saturday, we joined the General Assembly, and that's exactly what we did.
I stood atop the steps with chimes in my hand, and explained how being silent together might help with inner nourishment and support group cooperation. The facilitator asked the assembly if they wanted to proceed with nine minutes of silence, and a sea of hands were waving back at me with fingers pointing towards the sky -- the gesture to indicate approval.
(Note: Our group had communicated with the facilitation committee before hand to have this ask on the agenda, we didn't just show up unannounced.)
So we had nine minutes of silence together. Three minutes to contemplate the past -- what led us all to being there that night? Three minutes to rest in the present -- listening to sounds of the street and the feelings in our bodies. Three minutes to aspire together to non-violence in our future actions.
To close, I read a dedication that I wrote for the occasion, the words echoed back by human microphone:
May all beings come to know peace, May our social systems come to know justice, May our path embody these goals, For the benefit of all.

(Full dedication text here.)
After the nine minutes ended, the meeting agenda continued. We heard from union representatives from Morocco, Canada and Colombia expressing solidarity with the occupiers. Soon we were on to budget proposals and back into the business of organizing a social movement.
I spoke to several attendees after the meeting closed, and most everyone expressed that the silence was grounding and supportive of the group dialogue that followed. In my experience, spending time in silence makes me feel more connected to myself, and more able to communicate my needs to a group without being pushy or dumping my emotions onto others. If any bit of that was felt by the group on Saturday, then the implications of bringing silence and contemplation into group dynamics could be quite large.
It makes me wonder about the houses of Congress and our bite-sized cable news debates. If these arenas of dialogue were so inspired to invite silence in, would the quality of our civic conversation change? Could the gap between individuals be more easily bridged?
Our quality of life and future on this planet may just depend upon it.
Photos courtesy Michael Coniaris Photography
Follow Patrick Groneman on Twitter: www.twitter.com/namenorg
My experience in DC was nothing like this, and their treatment of its working citizens, culminating in the crippling of our streets, turned all of my sympathy for this movement into antipathy.
A short time after the bridge protests, the number of tents in McPherson rose sharply. They began to camp out in front of restaurants, making some of them inaccessible completely. The noise level in the office buildings, ours and those around us, began to get really upsetting, but we dealt with it, because free speech is important, especially to folks like us.
My feelings actually started to turn in earnest when they began erecting an unsafe structure in the park we just restored. Getting people behind the effort to grant funds to McPherson for improvements was no small task, and I can't even claim to have done much but keep bugging people with advocacy there, but I cared about it. They claimed to care about the homeless but they didn't set up in Franklin Park where the homeless are generally situated.
They hurled verbal abuse at colleagues and at my partner, when the work they do is all about fighting corporate corruption in her case and when all of us donate time and money to the homeless and those in need. But we're used to ignorant protestors in this city so that wasn't too hard to get past. But usually they're not so awful to the cops.
The police were so patient with them, news accounts don't even capture what we saw on the ground, especially with the guy who was hanging off the structure. (cont'd)
I didn't have time to watch the whole thing, I grant you, but I heard enough of what they were saying to the cops to be furious. I won't repeat it. It was freezing and at one point they were climbing this dangerous half-built structure, and the whole time people were trying to antagonize them.
Then, when OWS shut down K street, that was the point of no return, for me. We had some advance warning about it so we urged our secretary to get out of there early to get to her kids. It didn't even help. They were stranded for hours. She is never late to get them, so it wasn't a good situation.
People keep portraying it as though they only hurt lobbyists and 'fatcats', but you can't shut down K street without choking literally half the southern routes in and out of town, and the congestion built up quickly all the way into Virginia. We could hear ambulances trapped in the traffic, doing the desperate 'whoop-whoop' they do when they're trying to get people out of the way. We saw cars trying to sidle up practically onto the sidewalk to get out of the way, at one point. The protestors didn't care. They lay in the streets while cops on Clydesdales put themselves bodily between angry commuters and the protestors, and the protestors called them 'pigs' and things that I couldn't really hear well through the noise but that sounded extremely hateful.
(cont'd)
Fifteen years ago, I meditated with a group of healing professionals in California and we raised the energy level in the room high enough to make the walls sweat.
If folks are interested in regularly meditating with a group of people as a service to others, Unity non-denominational churches meditate as a group once a week at the local churches for prayer requests for 30 days whereupon the requests are sent to the headquarters to be prayed over for another 30 days. Nationally, they take prayer requests, where they pray for the requested prayer http://www.unity.org/prayer , 1-800-669-7729, international 01-816-969-2000 for 30 days in an uninterrupted meditation at their headquarters in Lee Summit, MO. They welcome all people of all ethnicities and all religious backgrounds.
I am not a Christian, and I felt at ease. No high pressure conversion.