What Lent Taught Me About Silence, Soul, and Stepping Away From the Noise

There are certain people who shape us quietly.

Not through force.
Not through preaching.
Not through trying to convince us of anything.

Simply through the depth of their presence and the sincerity of the way they live.

For me, one of those people was Jeannine — our beloved “Big Mama.”

She was a family friend from France, raised Catholic, and deeply devoted to her faith. But what stayed with me was never religion in its rigid or fear-based form. It was not shame. It was not dogma. It was not the kind of faith that leaves people wounded and afraid of God.

What I experienced in Jeannine was love.

She loved God.
She loved the sacred.
She loved the season of Lent.

And through her, I came to understand that Lent was not merely a religious observance. It was a sacred invitation. A season of quieting down. A season of going inward. A season of becoming more prayerful, more contemplative, more honest, and more available to what is deepest and most true.

She made Lent feel holy in the truest sense of the word.

Not performative.
Not heavy.
Not punishing.

Sacred. Intentional. Alive.

That understanding stayed with me.

And over time, Lent became meaningful to me too.

I am Jewish. Not symbolically. Not casually. Not as a vague spiritual label. I am Jewish by ethnicity and lineage — deeply so. I am Ashkenazi Jewish, and that identity is part of me in every way. At the same time, I have always had a deep love for religion, ritual, and spiritual tradition more broadly. I have been drawn to the wisdom of many paths for most of my life.

When I was 18, during my first semester of college, I took a class on Eastern religion. That class had a profound impact on me. It opened something in me that never closed again. It shaped the course of my inner life and deepened my reverence for the many ways human beings seek truth, meaning, God, transcendence, healing, and awakening.

Since then, I have spent much of my life studying world religion and spiritual traditions. My home reflects that love. There are Buddhist statues throughout it. Hindu deities. Sacred symbols from different paths and traditions that have nourished me over the years.

Some people may find that contradictory.

I do not.

Because I have never believed that wisdom belongs to only one doorway.

I believe there is beauty all over the map if we have the humility to recognize it.

I believe we can draw from different spiritual traditions in ways that deepen our own lives without diminishing where we come from. I believe different faiths and practices carry different medicines. And I believe we lose something when we become so rigid that we can no longer recognize truth unless it arrives wearing familiar clothes.

That is part of what Lent has always represented to me.

It is not “mine” by religion, but it has deeply shaped me by practice.

Every year, I return to it.

Not out of obligation.
Out of love.
Out of recognition.
Out of reverence for what that season evokes in me.

Because Lent invites what so many of us are starving for:

less noise,
less distraction,
less performing,
less consuming,
and more soul.

A Season of Going Inward

This year, for Lent, I chose to step away from social media completely.

What I wanted was not some dramatic act of deprivation. I did not do it to prove a point. I did it because I wanted quiet. I wanted to come back to myself. I wanted relief from the endless stream of information, opinion, advertising, urgency, and emotional static that has become so normalized that many people no longer even realize how flooded they are.

I wanted to know what would happen if I stopped reaching outward so much.

And what I found was peace.

Not because life suddenly became easy.
Not because the world stopped being broken.
But because my mind became less crowded.

I loved not being constantly inundated by tragic world events I could do nothing about. I am not someone who sits around watching the news, and stepping away from social media meant I was no longer being force-fed a steady stream of fear, outrage, catastrophe, and crisis from every direction.

Some people would say you need to know what is happening at all times.

I do not entirely agree.

There is a difference between being informed and being flooded.

And I think many people are far more flooded than they realize.

I also loved not being pulled into whatever was going viral, whatever everyone was reacting to, whatever the algorithm had decided mattered that day. There was a kind of psychological spaciousness that opened up when I was no longer being constantly interrupted by the world’s demands for my attention.

And in that spaciousness, I could feel myself again.

What the Quiet Revealed

The break also showed me something honest.

I am easily influenced.

There. I said it.

I can see a hair product, a skin product, a supplement, something for the house, something for wellness, and before I know it, I am online buying something I did not need five minutes earlier. Not all of it is bad. Some of it I have genuinely loved. But much of it is simply the result of living in an environment designed to influence desire, provoke dissatisfaction, and keep people consuming.

What became so clear to me during this social media break was just how much less I wanted when I was not constantly being sold to.

I spent less money.
I had more peace.
I felt less pulled.
Less manipulated.
Less fragmented.

And maybe most interesting of all, I did not miss much.

That told me something.

It made me ask a very real question: Do I even want to go back?

And if I do, how do I want to go back? What is my relationship to that space now? What do I actually want to say? What is worth contributing, and what is just more noise?

Those are questions I am still sitting with.

Because I know this much: I do not want to be just another therapist online, saying the same things, packaging depth into little bite-sized clips, and pretending that 30 seconds of content is the same thing as transformation. I have no interest in adding to the noise simply to maintain visibility.

If I return, I want it to come from clarity.

I want it to mean something.

The Spiritual Cost of Constant Noise

One of the things this season reaffirmed for me is that noise is not neutral.

Constant stimulation is not neutral.
Constant input is not neutral.
Constant exposure is not neutral.

It affects the psyche.
It affects the nervous system.
It affects our relationship with our own inner life.

When your attention is always being pulled outward, it becomes harder to hear what is true inside you. Your own thoughts get drowned out. Your discernment gets weaker. Your prayer life gets thinner. Your mind gets noisier. Your nervous system becomes more vulnerable to agitation, comparison, influence, and exhaustion.

Quiet is not emptiness.

Quiet is where we return to ourselves.

Quiet is where we metabolize life.

Quiet is where prayer deepens.

Quiet is where we can hear God again.

This is one of the reasons I believe contemplative practice matters so much, whether it comes through Judaism, Catholicism, Buddhism, Hinduism, or any path that helps a person become more inwardly awake, more sincere, and more connected to what is sacred.

The forms may differ.

But the invitation is often the same:
slow down,
listen,
detach from the unnecessary,
and remember what matters.

What Other Traditions Can Teach Us

One of the great gifts of my life has been learning from traditions beyond the one I was born into.

Not in a shallow way.
Not in a trendy way.
Not by abandoning who I am.

But by allowing myself to be touched by wisdom wherever I found it.

You do not have to be Catholic to appreciate the contemplative depth of Lent.

You do not have to be Buddhist to understand the value of meditation.

You do not have to be Hindu to feel reverence in the presence of sacred imagery or devotion.

There is so much we can learn from one another when we stop approaching religion as a territorial argument and start approaching it with humility, maturity, and curiosity.

I think that is part of what true spiritual depth requires.

Not rigidity.
Not superiority.
Not fear of difference.

But reverence for truth, wherever it appears.

For me, Lent has been one of those truths.

Lent, at Its Best, Is an Invitation to Clear Space

At its best, Lent is not about punishment.

It is not about performative suffering.
It is not about proving your goodness.
It is not about deprivation for the sake of deprivation.

It is about making space.

Space for God.
Space for reflection.
Space for honesty.
Space for what is deeper than appetite, habit, distraction, or compulsion.

In a culture that constantly tells us to consume more, buy more, react more, post more, and prove more, there is something profoundly healing about a season devoted to less.

Less noise.
Less reaching.
Less compulsion.
Less scattering of the self.

And from that “less,” something greater emerges:

clarity,
peace,
presence,
discernment,
and a deeper relationship with what is sacred.

What I’m Left With

Now that Lent has ended, I find myself sitting with a question I do not want to rush:

Do I want to go back to social media in the same way?

At this point, the answer is no.

Not in the same way.
Not unconsciously.
Not automatically.

Because once you step out of the stream and feel how peaceful it is on the shore, it becomes a lot harder to throw yourself back into the current without asking why.

I am no longer interested in participating in things simply because they are modern, expected, or good for business.

I am interested in what is true.
What is aligned.
What is worth saying.
What is worth my energy.
What actually adds value.

And until I know that clearly, remaining quiet feels wiser than speaking just to fill space.

An Invitation to Go Inward

You do not have to be Catholic to receive the wisdom of Lent.

You do not even have to be religious to understand the value of stepping back from the noise and returning to yourself.

You may simply need to ask:

Where is my attention going?
What is it costing me?
What would happen if I got quiet long enough to hear myself again?

Maybe your version of this looks like a social media break.
Maybe it looks like less news.
Maybe it looks like more prayer.
More walking.
More journaling.
More contemplation.
More silence.

We live in a world that trains us to believe that more input means more awareness, more noise means more relevance, and more visibility means more value.

I do not believe that.

I think there are seasons when the wisest, holiest, most life-giving thing we can do is step back.

To quiet the mind.
To disentangle from influence.
To come home to ourselves.
To listen for God.
To remember that the sacred is rarely found in frenzy.

Sometimes it is found in stillness.

Sometimes it is found in restraint.

Sometimes it is found in the courageous decision to stop reaching outward and begin listening inward.

And sometimes, that is where peace begins.