Sitting in Silence is a practice that I have practiced since the early 1990s so for over three DECADES. Mostly it has been for a minute, sometimes over the years it has been when eating or drinking at a cafe or at a restaurant by myself. At other times it has been when going for a walk and sitting on the grass in a park or on a bench, seeing people walking by. Solitude, Silence and Slowing down have been my three best friends when I have so much on my mind, when I have been going through dips in my relationships, when I need to process a traumatic event.

Through the ups and downs in life, these three friends but especially silence has helped me deal with the curve balls life thrown my way.

You see when you sit in silence, what you often find is drowning out of the noise from the outside world and you drowning in your own inner world. You discover your own thoughts and feelings that you have buried deep inside.

Long before I discovered that I am The Muslim Alchemist online, i.e started calling myself that or referring to myself in that way…. I have been practicing alchemy in a very simple and modest way.

This was as a social worker in the Midlands, Coventry and Rugby to be precise where I trained from 1988 to 1991 at the Polytechnic. I started the social work stream in 1988 and my first placement was in Rugby, Youth Justice Team. Rugby is a small town in Warwickshire in England. My office was situated in a building a few minutes walk from the Train station.

Many of the young people that I worked with lived in Rugby and many loved in small villages surrounding the town. Many lived in foster homes. Warwickshire County council was famous to being the Council who had closed most of their children homes and so children in care only had the option of being in a foster family.
Some children this worked out well. However for some children they had a series of foster placement and so by twenty different placements in a few years, they were very traumatised and behaviour had declined and a few ended up in the criminal justice system or working with us to prevent them coming into the criminal justice system.
I was a student social worker in 1988 when I joined the team in April 1988 and the Fostering and Adoption team was located in the opposite building.
The Youth Justice Team worked very closely with Fostering and Adoption Team.

With few resources, my colleagues and myself supervised, encouraged, coached, taught, mentored these children and young people. Many of them showed very disturbing behaviour.
Often we had to rely on our skills to give these children hope and to guide them on how to be well behaved and law abiding citizens when they left our building.

Three children had had crappy lives and been through so much trauma and that was why they were in care but then they also had to deal with the trauma of being moved around from place to place from one foster family to another.

Alchemy is transforming base metals into GOLD.

What I was doing back in 1988 was transforming the disappointment, the disillusionment, the anger, the hopelessness that these children felt into HOPE, hope of a better life, an INDEPENDENT life.

Just by facilitating a space through sport  activities or teaching them photography or sitting in a room exploring their relationships with parents, boyfriends, teachers etc…. these children and young people blossomed into confident individuals or individuals who had days where they would not be verbally or physically aggressive to anyone or be able to stay in a foster home for months instead of weeks.

By establishing a rapport with the children and young people, slowly they began to trust me. The rapport was not established straight away. It took weeks in some instances and in some cases months. I worked as a student social worker not in a paid capacity and I remember going back to my student accommodation a small house I rented with two other girls in their twenties after a day in Rugby and sitting in silence and staring at the wall for half an hour. My housemate would find me sitting in silence sometimes in the dark with the curtains drawn in the living room sitting on the sofa, staring at the wall.
I remember the wall. It had a small telephone stand and a telephone on it.
I was processing all the events of the day.
I ended up working as a sessional worker for Warwickshire County council that summer of 1988 in a paid capacity with the children who were in care in the summer scheme.

I didn’t know it then but Taniya Hussain The Muslim Alchemist was born then.
I became her then.
I have fond memories of working with two girls then. Both made a real impression on me. I have changed their names to fictional names for obvious reasons.
One I will call Avina and she was from a Gujarati background and had ended up in the criminal justice system on a Supervision Order because she had robbed an elderly woman and in the attempted robbery, assaulted her badly. By the time Avina stopped working with me, she had left school with some exams and was working as a secretary in an office. She had not reoffending. The other girl was fourteen years old born into a Black Caribbean family but had been fostered by White Foster families most of her life. Mary saw herself as White and I was given her case to explore her identity with her.
I recall Mary used to spit at me in sessions and was either silent or passive.
One afternoon I took Mary on a trip to London and took her shopping in Harrods in London. Mary did not know what to buy with the money she had been given by her foster family. Something though kept drawing her to this mirror. A hand held mirror in the cosmetics section stood on the counter grabbing her attention.
I encouraged her to buy it. I had been working with her to highlight that although she saw herself as White… The world saw herself as Black. Mary then could not understand why she was treated differently at times. She didn’t understand why she was discriminated due to the colour of her skin. Her White Foster parents could not explain it to her. It was seen as my task to teach this to her.
I still remember the day trip Mary and I took to London leaving Rugby in the morning and spending the afternoon in London.
I am sure when I returned home to Coventry that was where my student digs were in Hillfields a very run down area, I sat on the sofa afterwards in the front room and sat in silence processing what happened.

Have you ever sat in silence?
Does it help you swim in your own thoughts and feelings.
After you drown out all the external noise, do you find the more often you sit in silence, the less you are drowning in your own thoughts and feelings?
I would love to know.
#sittinginsilence
#themuslimalchemist