My silent cloistered life

12 Years in a Carthusian Convent: What happens when a modern young woman chooses life as a hermit? Miek Pot offers a detailed account of her remarkable journey. Contrary to the conventional life that was expected of her, she chose to follow her own inner bearings into one of the strictest Monastic Orders in the world. She spent twelve years as an eremitic monk in silence following the Carthusian Tradition.

Miek Pot (1960) had a deep awareness of the emptiness and meaninglessness of life from an early age. While she loved to party, drink and smoke and live life to the extremes in her student days, a hunger for something undefinable was born. When she spent a few days in a monastery to study, she was stopped in her tracks by the overwhelming silence. This experience was stronger than anything that came before it and so her search began. She eventually finds her place in an eremitic monastery where silence and solitude form the basis of life. Here she embarks on a spiritual path, through meditation, prayer and the study metaphysics, that takes her deeper into her inner world. In this honest book, she shares her profound and every day experiences of life as a hermit. With humour and warmth she recounts the challenges, the joy and the great insights that propelled her towards a greater understanding and experience of life and her ultimate decision to return to the outside world.