Room for Silence

A room of silence, such as you find lately in the house in Rudolfstraße with its departments of out-patient hospice, grief counselling and Academy, offers the opportunity to enter with music or the sound of singing bowls and to relax in contemplation. The room of silence is something like a safe place of refuge and of feeling well.

The new room of silence offers a space for colleagues, for guests who stay in our house, and for grief counselling. People in general and particularly those in mourning need and appreciate places of retreat since they are in emotionally difficult and straining situations. I meet people in deep mourning who are afraid of the future but who also ask questions about life’s transitoriness and death and deal with the great challenge of gaining new strength and perspectives. Here, in this new room, the bereaved can open up to a process of adaptation –and that is what mourning means- and can listen and perceive the vastness within themselves.

I would like to relate, dear reader, three quotations from my practice of grief counselling:

“I am sitting here in this wonderful room of silence. It is a relief. I can settle down, thoughts and tears will flow, but also a certain calmness starts spreading within myself.”

“What a powerful room for the burden of my mourning!”

“I thought so often I could not go on anymore, but after talking and staying in the room of silence I left it calm and with new strength.”

 

Achim Wasserfuhr, supervision of bereavement support