What Can Monk Silence Teach About Finding Joy in World That Never Stops?

How Can You Discover Inner Peace When Life Is Loud? A Lesson from Pico Iyer’s Aflame. Learning from Silence

Discover how Pico Iyer’s Aflame unlocks the secrets of the monastic lifestyle to help you find profound happiness and personal growth through the power of silence. If you are ready to quiet the external noise and listen to the wisdom that awaits in stillness, let’s begin this journey together.

Genres

Mindfulness, Happiness, Personal Development, Philosophy

Gain a deeper understanding of the monastic lifestyle.

Aflame (2025) shows how the deepest answers to life’s questions come from sitting quietly in the fire of silence. It takes us on a journey into a remote monastery where silence reveals unexpected connections, inner peace, and the fierce joy of simply being. It’s a powerful invitation to discover how stillness can light up our lives in ways we never imagined.

The author Pico Iyer would be the first to tell you that he doesn’t really have what it takes to be a monk. He also doesn’t consider himself to be a very religious person, and he doesn’t talk much about meditation in the strict sense. But he is very open and familiar with all of these things, and has experienced the benefits of the monastic lifestyle firsthand.

While Iyer is known for his travel writing, what can be learned from his time staying in one place? In this summary, we look at his personal and poetic reflections after years with the Benedictine monks of Big Sur. We’ll break down how he approached silence and solitude – drawing on the wisdom of friends like the Dalai Lama and Leonard Cohen – to understand what this quiet life taught him.

If that sounds like your cup of tea, let’s get started.

From the ashes, a new light

There’s something quietly astonishing about walking into a place where silence isn’t an absence but a presence, where it feels like the world is holding its breath just long enough for you to hear yourself think – maybe for the first time in a long while. Iyer discovered this through a mix of terrible happenstance and pure chance.

Many years ago, his family home in Santa Barbara, California was reduced to ashes by a wildfire. Iyer barely made it out alive. After some nights sleeping on couches and floors, a friend told him about another option: a monastic retreat known as the Camaldoli Hermitage. For a small, recommended donation of around $25 a night, he could get his own little trailer at a Catholic monastery overlooking the Pacific, just up the coast, along the rocky shoreline at Big Sur.

Iyer’s parents are both Indian, but he wasn’t raised religious. In fact, twelve years of enforced school prayers left him allergic to religion. When he told his mom about where he’d ended up, she was naturally skeptical. Would they try to convert him? But no. These Benedictine monks weren’t demanding at all. At this hermitage, there were even nods to the Buddha and the Rig Veda.

But what the place really provided was silence. And it turned out that this is what Iyer really needed. Perched between the ocean and the redwood forest, the quiet becomes something active – almost humming. Being at the Hermitage didn’t disconnect you from the world so much as it let the unnecessary chatter fall away so that you could connect more deeply with the real world.

In this setting, you notice things anew. With the blue sky above and the blue water below – so vast they seem to wash all the unimportant stuff away. Even the simplest details become scripture: a red-tailed hawk circling above lavender, the steady hush of waves against Big Sur cliffs, or the quiet, warm gold light filtering through the chapel’s small windows. There’s a moment when you realize you’re not just freed from your deadlines and arguments but from the self you become around others. And somehow, in the hush, you feel closer to people you love, even if they’re far away, and connected to strangers you pass without a word.

He recalled the stories of people like the explorer Admiral Byrd, who sat alone in the icy dark near the South Pole, receiving radio messages from President Roosevelt. Byrd found that in solitude, life felt more alive than ever. Iyer began to understand how losing all you own can be tragic, but it can also clear space for something deeper to arrive.

Going inward to be more outward

After his first visit to the Hermitage, Iyer never stopped coming back. In good times and in bad, it became his place to recharge, recalibrate, and ground himself with clarity and purpose.

One friend asked him, “Isn’t it kind of selfish to run off to a monastery? To leave your loved ones behind so you can sit in silence?” The author understands how it might look. But it isn’t selfish if time at the monastery is the one thing that makes you less selfish.

Spending time in silence and solitude can naturally bring up thoughts of Henry David Thoreau, the famous 19th-century American philosopher and writer. His book Walden has given Thoreau the reputation of being a recluse and extolling the virtues of being a hermit. But a closer reading of Thoreau’s motivations reveal a profound dedication to community. And this is precisely what the Hermitage extols as well.

The monks themselves are not detached escapees but live as a harmonious unit, tied to obligations until their last breath. They remind us that contemplation is all about opening your eyes fully to everything around you, letting your senses wake up after being numbed by screens and noise.

This same impulse to find perspective is timeless. Thoreau’s cabin in the woods was its own pilgrimage of return, a deliberate retreat to see the world in its proper proportions. His journey reveals that silence is a space alive with possibility, where you’re invited to let your mind grow quiet enough to catch the soft, essential truths that can only arrive when everything else falls away.

In this silence, there is a quiet promise – that you can let yourself become aflame from within, even as the world continues to burn. Here, nothing is missing, and everything feels newly alive, aligned into one clear, singing whole.

It’s true that this flame can quickly get snubbed out once you return to daily life. A few days back in the grind, the doubts crawl in like summer flies. Iyer is well aware that he’s no monk. He knows his girlfriend and her two kids are waiting for him in Japan, needing him emotionally and financially. His mother, who’s lost her home to wildfire, needs him too. But he also knows that the quiet days in Big Sur allow him to shine a light into the darker corners of his greater existence.

When Iyer does return to Japan, he can feel at home in their cramped apartment. He sleeps on a couch beside the TV and works at a desk only when Sachi is off at school. It might look like a prison from the outside, but he sees how luxury can be defined by all you don’t need to long for. A monk once told him that anyone can sit in a meditative temple. The trick is to sit in the world.

A way to meet the predicament of life

The author has learned as much through silent reflection as he’s learned from those he’s met thanks to his time at the Hermitage. This includes both the Dali Lama and the musician Leonard Cohen.

In the 1990s, Cohen became a Zen Buddhist monk and was deeply devoted to an elderly Japanese abbot named Joshu Sasaki. He had his own quiet retreat in Los Angeles, with its built-in music studio. But he was often found tending to the ailing abbot, scrubbing his floors and washing his feet.

Cohen’s early songs were often about the pain of love and chasing desires. But that changed when he became a monk. As he described it, this change was simply the most imaginative way he’d found to meet the predicament of life. In silence, he told the author in his one-of-a-kind gravelly voice that he discovered a peace that transcends the intellectual struggle for questions and answers, allowing him to rest in a landscape free from doubt.

During this period, Cohen’s songs started to examine the deeper struggle beneath labels like “happiness” and “sadness.” Leonard never hid his defeats, but the songs became a place to believe in a reality you can’t fully comprehend.

The Dali Lama has spent a lifetime meditating on the causes and solutions to suffering. When he thinks about the saddest thing that’s happened to him, he recalls his exile, over fifty years ago, when he parted ways with his escorts. The men had spent two weeks getting him to safety and were bound to return home to their certain deaths.

And now, when the Dali Lama considers a question about his most cherished achievements, he thinks about meeting a man from Johannesburg who felt hopeless in life. Because of apartheid, he couldn’t get a job, couldn’t vote – he lived without freedom or hope. The Dali Lama believes that after their encounter, the man left with hope, and that day lives larger in his estimation than winning the Nobel Prize.

This kind of perspective – valuing a single human connection over the world’s highest honors – is precisely what solitude cultivates. It’s an inward journey that clarifies what truly matters, allowing one to return to the world with a greater capacity for service. Thoreau himself believed his personal good was found only in his attempt to serve the public. The real gift of silence, then, is measured by the quiet, attentive energy we bring back into the world we’re meant to love.

Monastic living is the deepest expression of this principle. While some may see it as a preparation for death, it is in fact a profound education in how to fully live.

At the Hermitage, Iyer spends quiet days meeting monks who’ve traded busy lives for a rhythm of prayer and stillness. One monk used to paint prayers with colors that glow like moonlight on water. Another shares how becoming a monk is a ten-year unwinding of the self, a facing of shadows, longing, and the dark nights of the soul. Some say we’re like sea anemones – open when safe, in environments like the Hermitage, but closed when threatened by the noise of modern life.

Embracing the limits

In his quiet cell at the Hermitage, Pico feels he’s doing nothing, but pages pile up with words he scribbles – letters, poems, notes for friends – like small offerings from a deeper place inside. Here, without distractions, he notices the flowers, hears the sea lions, and feels the stars above Highway 1 like blessings in the dark.

He remembers how, when his father was dying, the only thing that made him feel prepared for this moment was what he’d gathered in silence – the kind of inner resource that transcends what was on his resume or in his bank account.

Through conversations and quiet walks, he’s learned that faith reveals itself as a willingness to walk through the dark, to trust what you can’t control. When he searches for a lost poem he wrote, and finds it smeared with yogurt in the trash can – he leaves it there. Nothing lasts forever, but each moment of stillness, each word that comes in silence, serves its purpose while it lasts.

The monks at the Hermitage are so full of life. Some seem to literally be glowing. When they sing in the chapel, the birds and the sea seem to echo it back. They’re bright, unpretentious, sociable, teasing each other, cooking meals with care and color because, an act one monk explains is rooted in the simple need to bring a little brightness into the others’ day. They’re living close to the bone, a simple existence that gives rise to a lightness that points upward.

There are also dogs and cats at the Hermitage, and flowers that are arranged with the same quiet devotion they give to washing dishes. Here, contemplation is the practice of seeing suffering and anxiety with clarity. The dark places are invited to the surface gently, allowing you to notice the suffering you cause in yourself and others, which is more important than the suffering you endure.

When he comes to the Hermitage, Iyer notices that it’s hard to curse anyone, because he’s no longer locked in his own perspective. Empathy blooms. He finds himself writing letters, feeling the mind expand like the blue sky, noticing how joy isn’t the same as pleasure and how freedom comes from embracing limits.

Sometimes, in the night, fear and chaos still wake him up. But then he remembers the sun is still there. Soon enough he’ll hear the gentle laughter of the monks, and the tender rituals of daily life. He’ll feel himself become part of something larger, something quiet and alive, reminding him that all things are in flux, all things are unfinished, and in that truth, there is room to breathe.

Feet in the dirt, eyes on the stars

There’s a sort of magic that happens at Hermitage. When one visitor told a monk how wonderful their work is, the monk replied, almost laughing, that they don’t do anything at all. And that’s the magic. They’re creating a “nothingness” where people can drop the noise of the world and become themselves again. It’s a place where emptiness is a gift that fills you up.

A Cuban woman practicing Tibetan Buddhism, an executive from Southeast Asia, all sitting in silence, turned inside out together. You leave your public self at the door, and suddenly you’re sharing your quietest, truest self with strangers who feel like instant comrades.

Cyprian, the prior, or head of the monastery, tells us that silence is what people need in order to truly hear themselves. And when people ask how they can help, he points them to the world outside – to the vulnerable in California, to those who’ve lost homes, to the places where help is needed most. His family, in the end, is the world.

Cyprian is passionate about music, and the shelves of his room are filled with works on Hinduism, Buddhism, Islam. It’s a reminder that true faith is found in an openness that lets the beauty of many paths meet in quiet.

Cyprian remains optimistic, even though, as the years go on, monastic life appears to be fading. Commitments that last a lifetime are rare in an age of quick distractions. The Hermitage now has almost eight hundred lay oblates, people who live in the world but honor the monks’ principles. Yet the number of actual monks shrinks, many of them growing old, caring for one another until the very end.

Wildfires in the area remain a persistent threat – destroying the field across the street, but somehow stopping just short of the Hermitage grounds. In the face of destruction, Cyprian and the monks remain steady, sending out their regular calls to vespers and vigils, tending to silence and stillness as everything else falls away.

Even in the quiet horror of the pandemic, there is a strange clarity. Walks become sacred. The world, paused, feels closer to the silence of a monastery. And when the world reopens, you return to the Hermitage changed, seeing beauty with fresh eyes, realizing that to find something you can’t doubt may be the closest you get to faith.

As one Zen teacher puts it, monastic living is about living with your feet in the dirt and your eyes on the stars. And it’s between the stars and the stones, between silence and action, we find what truly matters – and what survives the fires, the storms, and even the noise of our restless world.

Conclusion

In this summary to Afire by Pico Iyer, you’ve learned that our deepest journey is a process of learning how to be present with what is already around us – and within us.

Through reflections on simplicity and letting go, we learn that the most courageous step forward is often one of stepping back – an act that grants us new, clear eyes to see the world and ourselves. Silence is the practice that cultivates this clarity. It is an invitation to pause, to find a deep fulfillment in slowness, and to allow ourselves to be truly changed by our experiences. This way of life reveals its own richness, offering a purpose rooted in the simple act of being. It’s a reminder that even in moments of uncertainty, there is room for clarity, and that by creating space within ourselves, we can meet the world, and each other, with deeper compassion and presence.