reading on the worth website. Nick was one of the guys in the series 'the monastery'. He later visited St Hugh's for a month and here's an extract from what he says about the experience.

"But the really difficult thing was just being present. This is what Dom Cyril, the novice master would keep emphasising when he came to check up on me every few days or so. “Just be here,” he would say. And for the first week or so he would always ask me whether or not I was there yet. It took a few days to really understand what he meant. With little to occupy or distract my mind I became very aware of how much of my time is spent elsewhere – thinking about all the things I could or should be doing, the people I might be seeing, what I would do when I got out, and so on. Indeed, much of this idle daydreaming was taken up with making plans for the future, surely the most pointless of enterprises, and a clear sign of a distracted mind.
The purpose of cultivating silence is to draw aside the mental screen on which we project the transient and ephemeral phenomena of everyday life, a mode of being characterised by distraction, of being anywhere and indeed everywhere else but here and now. It is to make ourselves present to the presence of God. And I really noticed how most of the time we are simply not present, even to ourselves or each other, never mind God.