Holding the Space: Silence, Practice, and the Long Arc of Becoming
Silence, Practice, and the Work of Engaging the World
Author’s Note
This essay grew out of this quarter’s International Meditation Hour, a shared session of silence, reflection, and conversation. What began as a live gathering—part meditation, part personal historical context—has been shaped here into a written form, preserving the spirit of the hour rather than attempting to reproduce it in full.
The shared period of silent meditation remains central to the original session. This essay does not replace that experience; it simply offers a point of orientation for those who participated, and an invitation for those encountering the work for the first time.
—Baruti KMT-Sisouvong, PhD
The International Meditation Hour was conceived as a shared pause—a space to step out of momentum and return to something more fundamental. Not an interruption, but a return. Not an explanation, but an invitation.
What follows in relation to the recent installment available via either Substack or YouTube is not a biography, though it draws from the arc of my own life. It is offered instead as context: a tracing of how early contemplative experiences, academic inquiry, and sustained meditation practice gradually converged into a life shaped by teaching, research, and service. The details matter less than the pattern they reveal.
Long before I acquired a language to explain consciousness, I noticed something simple and persistent: some environments felt coherent, others felt off. Certain spaces—and certain people—carried a quality of alignment, while others produced a subtle but unmistakable friction. I did not yet call this awareness “consciousness,” but it shaped my attention, intention, and, eventually, my questions.
Those questions led me, in the spring of 1993, to an unexpected encounter in downtown Atlanta. A stranger—whose name I do not recall knowing—recommended a book and asked me to promise I would secure it for study. We shook hands. “Young man,” he said, “I’ve changed your life for the rest of your life.” At the time, the words seemed a bit dramatic. In retrospect, they were precise. (You may read more about that experience here.)
That book introduced me not to belief, but to practice. At the end of each chapter was a meditation. During one such meditation, seated on the floor of my bedroom with my back against the wall, I had an experience that would quietly reorganise my understanding of inner life. It felt as though my body were a vast, cavernous space, and I—some small, attentive presence—was moving freely within it. There was no external motion, yet the experience carried a sense of interior dance. Something had opened.
What mattered was not the novelty of the experience, but its aftereffect. I began to notice synchronicities, clarity, and a subtle alignment between intention and outcome. Over time, this pattern repeated often enough to suggest that consciousness was not merely an epiphenomenon of life, but a participatory field within it.
Academic study followed—first in history, then sociology, then graduate work—alongside an expanding interest in how inner experience intersects with social systems. Years later, a mentor placed another book in my hands, one grounded not in metaphor but in empirical research on meditation and consciousness. That encounter led me to formally learn Transcendental Meditation (TM) Friday, 25 April 2008 during a torrential downpour in Fairfield, Iowa.
The first experience of TM was unmistakable. During my initial meditation, it felt as though the floor had dropped away beneath me—not frightening, but absolute. Effort fell away. The mind settled. A deep stability emerged beneath activity. What surprised me most was not what happened during the meditation, but what began to happen outside of it: increased clarity, reduced reactivity, and a growing capacity to respond rather than react.
That stability quietly reorganised the course of my life. It led me to deeper study, to teaching, and—most consequentially—to meeting my wife, Mina. Together, we have now worked with thousands of people across age, background, and most points along the socioeconomic spectrum. The pattern has been remarkably consistent: when people are given reliable access to inner silence, something fundamental shifts. Not everyone describes it the same way, but the effects—clarity, resilience, coherence—are unmistakable.
Over time, these observations became formal research and eventually crystallised into frameworks exploring how consciousness unfolds into lived experience. One such framework, the Seven Layers of Manifestation, begins with pure consciousness and traces its expression through universal and natural law, the phenomenal world, human awareness, and the social structures we collectively create. Another, the Model for Perpetual Growth and Progress, maps how inner stability can be translated into purposeful action beyond the self.
Yet frameworks are secondary. What matters most is the lived reality they point toward.
At the heart of International Meditation Hour is a twenty-minute period of silent meditation. The silence is intentional and unencumbered. It is not background or interlude, but the centre of the experience. In a culture saturated with commentary, explanation, and performance, holding space for shared silence is itself a radical act.
Meditation, in this sense, is not an escape from the world. It is preparation for engaging it more clearly. The calm cultivated inwardly does not remain private; it accompanies us into conversation, decision-making, and collective life. As Benjamin Elijah Mays once observed, “the circumference of life cannot be rightly drawn until the centre is set.”
In a time marked by fragmentation—social, political, and psychological—this matters. Not because meditation solves every problem, but because it restores access to the ground from which wise action can arise. Inner stability is not a luxury. It is a public good.
International Meditation Hour exists to hold that space—to offer a shared pause in which effort relaxes, attention settles, and something quieter becomes available. From that quiet, clarity emerges in its own time.
As always, take from this what is useful, and allow the rest to unfold quietly within you.
These packets of knowledge will be available when one is ready to review and receive them in the direction of acting on the same. In short, this is my gift to you!
Suggested Reflection
Set aside a few quiet minutes—after meditation or at the close of your day—and reflect on the following prompts. There is no need to answer them all. Allow one to meet you where you are.
Where in my life do I feel most settled, clear, or coherent—and what conditions make that possible?
What happens when I allow effort to soften, rather than trying to manage every outcome?
In what ways might inner stability serve not only my own life, but the lives of those around me?
What would it look like to “hold the space” for myself or others, without fixing or directing?
How might silence function not as withdrawal, but as preparation for wiser engagement?
After reflecting, return to your day gently. Let whatever clarity emerged continue unfolding quietly, in its own time.
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About the Author
Dr. Baruti KMT-Sisouvong is a consciousness scholar, executive coach, and Certified Teacher of Transcendental Meditation® based in Cambridge, Massachusetts. His work—spanning The Model for Perpetual Growth and Progress and The Seven Layers of Manifestation—explores how Pure Consciousness, neuroscience, and social-systems transformation intersect in the evolution of both the individual and society.
He is the Founder and Director of Radical Scholar Inc., a nonprofit organization dedicated to consciousness-based research and public scholarship, and President of Serat Group Inc., the parent company of Transcendental Brain, a consulting and educational platform bringing consciousness science into leadership and institutional development. He also serves as Host of the On Transcendence Podcast.
Alongside his wife, Mina, he co-directs the Cambridge and Metropolitan Boston TM Program and serves as Host and Founder of International Meditation Hour (IMH), a quarterly global gathering dedicated to the unifying power of silence.
He writes from the conviction that the most important race is not between nations or machines, but between the conditioned mind and the awakening soul.
To learn more about him, visit: https://www.barutikmtsisouvong.com/.