Stillness Speaks Book Previews

Tracy Cochran’s Presence: What Is The Gift Of Silent Waiting?

by Sanjiv Manifest | Oct 22, 2025

Tracy Cochran’s Presence: “… not speaking can also help you listen deeply and observe … Words need to be rooted in presence …” ~ Tracy Cochran

Rooted—not performed …

Let the moment be felt first … and let the words come after …

Discover – and integrate – the gift of silent waiting … letting the moment be felt before speech.

So, today, we explore when words {can} wait – where we simply let words arise from attention … through an excerpt from Tracy Cochran’s chapter Speechless from her book Presence: The Art of Being at Home in Yourself …

We began previewing her book in a three-part series where … Part I covered receiving without judgment …

And this post – Part 2 – takes a mini dive into the gift of silent waiting … via a real life scene that shows how the speechless unfolds …

Tracy finds that on the morning of one of her talks, her voice won’t come … Standing, stretching, pep-talks—none of it helps.

So she walks through the quiet house awashed in summer light and does the simplest thing: waits with attention. In that pause the drama loosens. Beneath the agitated mind she senses another mind—quieter, responsive, seeing without judgment.

Speech doesn’t arrive by force; it gathers from listening.

The discovery is modest and exact: when words wait, attention ripens; when attention is steady, language can rise without self-performance.

“Speechless” here isn’t failure but a doorway—wise speech beginning in silence.

This post is part of our ongoing Shambhala Publications series that offers substantive previews of selections from Shambhala Publications new and classic titles …

All italicized text here is adapted from Presence: The Art of Being at Home in Yourself by Tracy Cochran, © Tracy Cochran. Reprinted in arrangement with the publisher Shambhala Publications, Inc. Boulder, CO.

You can purchase the book at Shambhala Publications or Amazon.

Tracy Cochran’s Presence: Speechless

Standing up did not help. Neither did stretching or walking or smiling bravely in the bathroom mirror. I padded through a quiet house awash in golden summer light. Terrible images flashed before my eyes: Faces looking up at me, uncomprehending, dismayed. People heading for the exits.

Once the Buddha taught without speaking, holding up a single white flower. That wordless gesture must have stunned a crowd who came expecting brilliant stories and answers to their deepest questions. Yet according to legend, nobody threw rocks or heckled the Awakened One, and one man understood that he was embodying the inexpressible suchness of life. But I was not the Buddha. There was no holding up a rose or a carnation purchased at a New York deli somewhere between Grand Central Terminal and the museum on West 17th Street. Someone might think it was a game of Buddhist charades and call out “Flower Sermon,” which is what that teaching came to be known as. But no one was coming to the museum at lunch hour for an imitation. They were hoping for something real.

I stood on the stone floor of my front porch, looking through the screen door at the flowers and trees. Everything appeared still and serene, as if life were stable and predictable. But everything is subject to change. The flowers and even the bluestone slabs I stood on had not been here the year before, when I was not yet teaching at the Rubin Museum and had not yet been diagnosed with an essential voice tremor (after an initial misdiagnosis), a neurological disorder that makes my voice soft and husky at times, quivery at others.

After resisting for a while, I now undergo the standard therapy of injections of botulinum toxin in the vocal cords every three or four months. It helps. But the results can be unpredictable. A low dose that has worked well can become ineffective or suddenly too powerful, stealing a voice for many weeks.

“Maybe the universe is trying to tell you something,” someone said to me, when I explained about my voice. This was not kind, but also not wrong. Being without a voice in a wordy world is oppressive, I learned. But not speaking can also help you listen deeply and observe.

During the difficult stretches, I saw that life rolled along perfectly well without most of my opinions, which are mostly shallow and secondhand, not worth the effort it takes to rasp them out. When it’s hard to be heard, you need to mean what you say. Words need to be rooted in presence, in the real-time experience of how it feels to be here.

Life is difficult for everyone, I reminded myself. Even beautiful people with every seeming advantage live like combat soldiers much of the time—fighting for survival, struggling to maintain a positive attitude, wary and weary and scared. The people who were going to be filing into the museum were all fighting battles. They were seeking safety and welcome and company.

For brief periods, when life breaks our way, it can feel as if we are finally getting somewhere. We may think that we are finally becoming someone who understands this crazy life. With this self-image securely in place, we may decide that we are good and life is good and that we can share this with others. But things change. A voice or relationship or job or health is lost.

Instantly we contract, closing the doors and windows to intruders. We become little fortresses in a world that is suddenly dark and dangerous. I once heard a Buddhist teacher call the ego a defense against pain. I heard another great teacher say there is no point in trying to kill the ego because it was never really alive; it is a set of conditioned responses and thoughts that try to protect us by separating us from the whole. But we don’t like living in these self-enclosed little air locks. We feel cut off from life. We are afraid to step outside. We want the comfort of the known.

I showered and dressed to go, frightened and worried about how I would come across on stage and what people would think about me. But within this feeling of being trapped in the spotlight, there was another discovery: That under this agitated mind there is another mind, vastly quieter and more responsive, seeing without judgment.

~ Tracy Cochran

Stay tuned for … the conclusion of this series : opening to a shared world (receiving/giving) …

All italicized text here is adapted from Presence: The Art of Being at Home in Yourself by Tracy Cochran, © Tracy Cochran. Reprinted in arrangement with the publisher Shambhala Publications, Inc. Boulder, CO.

You can purchase the book at Shambhala Publications or Amazon.