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Meditation, Zen, yoga, confinement in monasteries... the flight from noise grows

2022-04-10T05:28:32.481Z


Meditation retreats without words or gestures, 'mindfulness', Zen, yoga, confinement in monasteries, isolation in isolated places... Travel to a social phenomenon that grows day by day, accompanied by an editorial explosion.


There is something that does not fit in the mysterious border between noise and silence.

Between the noise with or without sound of our societies and the intimate or shared silence of those who claim another reality.

This text will not solve the puzzle, so the reader who is hungry for answers and allergic to questions —pure antithesis of the philosophical process— can leave it here, and will do well.

However, a handful of life experiences that illustrate the only possible backdrop will be lost: doubt, the unfathomable.

Another possibility would have been to leave all these pages blank.

Perhaps it would be his thing, in homage to silence.

Countless believers of different religions or spiritual quests and a multitude of agnostics and atheists agree today in the weariness of the noisy gibberish.

Also in the need to seek silence as a medicine for physical, mental and spiritual ills through practices such as meditation with Christian, Buddhist or Hindu roots, Zen, yoga,

mindfulness

, temporary confinement in monasteries, silent retreats and even voluntary isolation for years in remote places.

Here the game is played by the aspirants to transcendence as well as the irreducible pagans.

Okay, more than 1,400 years ago Saturio died, that Visigoth hermit from a rich family who retired to a contemplative and silent life in a damp cave on the banks of the Duero in Soria.

It doesn't seem necessary to go that far: like good old Saturio there was only one, because he was often, even he ended up a saint.

The offer around the theme of silence is today amazingly wide, including a veritable editorial boom with dozens of titles on the subject flooding bookstores.

And, how could it be otherwise, there is everything: from authentic militants of the help to the other to the opportunists of the last hour, through doubtful professionals of altruism and an endless typology.

This is a subjective trip, only one among hundreds of possible ones.

A journey in search of those who go in search of it.

In search of silence.

A semi-dark view of a room in the cathedral of Segovia.

Jose Manuel Ballester

Visiting the Friends of the Desert.

A retreat of silence and meditation

The afternoon of a Friday in March is over when we arrive at Sant Honorat, the spiritual center of the missionaries of the Sacred Heart in Randa, in the south of Mallorca, in the mountains.

The destination of the trip is one of the many silence and meditation retreats organized each year by the Amigos del Desierto network, founded in 2014 by the priest and writer Pablo d'Ors and with a presence in Spain, Mexico, the United States, Argentina and Italy. .

Every year, more than 600 people attend silent retreats like this one.

The objective: to value and face some maxims.

For example, two of those that the distinguished thinker, professor and writer George Steiner pronounced six years ago in an extensive interview with EL PAÍS.

One: "There is no need to be afraid of silence, only silence teaches us to find what is essential in ourselves."

Two: "Young people no longer have time to have time."

Or any of the many that D'Ors himself captured in his

Biography of Silence

(published by Siruela, first, and by Galaxia Gutenberg, later), a brief and immense little book and one of the most unusual publishing bestsellers of recent times (nearly 300,000 copies sold in 41 editions): “We think a lot about life but we live it bit".

"Looking at something doesn't change it, but it changes us."

"Meditating helps you not take yourself so seriously."

“That dark and luminous ocean that is silence”.

So Tomeu, Verónica, Alex, Marcello, Nazareth, Julián, Jaume and the others have even come to the bewitching spot of Sant Honorat.

Twenty-five people of all kinds and conditions (the youngest, a Majorcan boy who comes from Austria, must be 25 years old and the oldest is a charming 90-year-old lady from Palma) willing to keep quiet —to keep quiet— for 40 hours and to look at ourselves —to look at ourselves— inside.

All this at the modest price of 170 euros, all included: single and spartan room with breathtaking views, meals with products from the garden that could be on the menu of a high-end vegetarian restaurant, meditation sessions, gym sessions , talks and sharing.

And all under the wise and serene baton of four monitors or meditative teachers, María Pilar, Cristina, Miguel and Rafa: a court secretary, a teacher, a school principal and a judge who do this

for free et amore

taking time out from under of the stones and touring Spain to train new

silent

ones .

Twelve meditation sessions of 25 minutes each, on your knees —with your ass glued to a wooden stool and your insteps making you cisco, which are crushed against the ground—, or in yoga posture, or simply sitting in a chair.

I am the only one of the 25 who has never meditated before.

Noticeable.

Of the three “anchors” needed to meditate—hands, breath, and reciting a mantra—I only have room for two.

The mantra resists.

Questions arise.

Do you have to meditate as you are, or do you have to escape from what you are in order to meditate?

How to empty the head of the utilitarian, dalliance and lucubration and how to make room for the essential?

By the way, what is essential?

How do you breathe well?

What is the purpose of silent meditation?

Response from one of the teachers: "Don't wait for anything to happen... because it is already happening."

Not a word.

No stares.

Zero gestures, including meals.

We are not here to be nice.

Slow movements.

We are not here for spasm and rush.

Banned mobile.

We are not here to continue to be hooked on the madding crowd.

No books.

We are not here to read.

Just a notebook and a pen to write down posture and breathing guidelines, recommendations —spiritual or not— and lines of thought suggested by the monitors.

And the silence.

Well, it's a saying.

Nothing like a silence retreat to prove that total silence does not exist.

A plane will pass.

A distant dog will bark.

The song of the Birds.

The noise of the wind on the windows.

The creak of the ceiling wood.

The rhythmic breathing of your meditator or meditator next door, with whom you sometimes end up synchronizing.

He will crackle the wood in the fireplace.

A gong will sound.

End of session.

You will return home enthusiastic, doubtful or skeptical.

Silence is free.

Also its impact on each one.

Silence is also fear.

It takes you into the unknown.

Cloister of the Benedictine abbey of Santo Domingo de Silos (Burgos), a jewel of Spanish Romanesque.José Manuel Ballester

Journey to the Benedictine stillness.

Three days in the monastery of Silos

Bats flutter frantically through the arcades of the Romanesque cloister.

It is 9:20 p.m., dinner time has just ended in the Benedictine abbey of Santo Domingo de Silos (Burgos) and three or four shadows wander frozen around the centenary cypress that Gerardo Diego sang about.

"Standing source of shadow and dream".

The Compline will begin immediately and, with it, the exhausting cycle of religious services that the 23 monks of Silos and their foreign guests concelebrate in the inn will close each day.

For 40 euros, the guest (in Silos only men) is entitled to full board and unlimited doses of peace... whenever he seeks it.

Brother Moisés, the host, only asks for four things: to stay a minimum of three nights and a maximum of seven, not to use the abbey as a mere hotel from which to go sightseeing, not to make noise and to be silent except in essential situations , and be punctual at meals and —if you attend— at religious events.

The regulations are not always followed, especially in points 2 and 3. "Today we do not eat here, we go sightseeing and eat a little lamb in Covarrubias" or "Let's go to the town to have a coffee and whatever comes" are phrases that could heard during the recent stay that served as the basis for this story.

But they are exceptions.

The rooms —and specifically this one 202, named Santa Virila— are perfect spaces for the practice of silence.

Also the cloister, the corridors, the orchard and the church, where only the Gregorian chant of the monks, pure rhythmic sighing 1,500 years old, breaks out as a soundtrack.

A soundtrack, remember, that in 1993 topped the record charts with more than 160,000 records sold.

Listening to him live at vigils (six in the morning), sitting in the choir itself when one of the monks invites you to do so (as happened today), is a rare privilege.

So far come students in full opposition, company executives in search of mental cleansing ("I come at least once a year and spend a week, and I leave with batteries charged to the top," says one of them, who prefers not to say his name), fans of the Romanesque, simple curious and practicing Catholics who find here a perfect context.

“Here the silence is impressive when you spend the first night…, it is something that you hear”, explains Toni, from Villena (Alicante), in this his second stay in Silos and after four Caminos de Santiago in solitude and absolute silence.

Barely an hour later, during sixth-form office, an entire Imserso bus will burst into the abbey church amid murmurs, first, and loud conversations, later.

The unpleasant feeling at that moment is that,

instead of a temple of silence, we are in a Corte Inglés of “spiritual tourism”.

“The Imserso is that he is fearsome”, brother Moisés will lament in the dining room.

One of the cells in the hospice of the Hieronymite monastery of Santa María del Parral, in Segovia.José Manuel Ballester


Seven years alone.

Arturo, the hermit of Santa Barbara

Arturo Rigol, a 63-year-old from Barcelona, ​​has been living alone up here for seven years, in one of the mountains that surrounds Alcañiz (Teruel).

He is the hermit of Santa Bárbara and lives in silence, except for the few escapes he makes to town for provisions or the doctor.

After giving quite a few stumbles, seven years ago he found out through a friend that the previous hermit had died and that they were looking for another.

"And I came right away and they caught me," he explains as we walk around the hermitage on a lead gray day that threatens a downpour and has brought a north wind that pierces the bones.

“I am not a believer, and I consider myself a libertarian.

Not an anarchist, eh? Otherwise I would be planting bombs!”

Arturo escaped from a haphazard life, let's say, and ended up in Santa Bárbara, where he fixes the hermitage, takes care of the grass and helps as much as he can when the San Salvador pilgrimage goes up, in June, or the Santa Bárbara one, in December, and also when the fifths of Alcañiz meet here.

The rest of the time he is up here, with the only company of his own self and his dogs

De he Popo

and

Zen

, in the middle of the mountain, surrounded by foxes, badgers and hares.

Arthur is a hermit.

And, if we stick to the definition of the RAE, he is also an anchorite: "Person who lives in a lonely place, given over entirely to contemplation and penance."

—And in the midst of so much silence, what do you do?

—To contemplation.

"And what do you say to yourself?"

Do you talk to yourself a lot?

—Moooo…, but I was already used to it because I had practiced zen meditation years ago.

Does silence help?

—The clear silence that helps, helps you find yourself.

I'm just arguing with myself here.

And of course, I'm always right, ha ha ha ha!

But hey, sometimes it's also complicated, it's not always easy.

For example, after the pandemic and confinement, it was very difficult for me to be alone again...

Arturo lived in Venezuela for 10 years and worked there, got married and had his daughter, Joana, 33, who is a designer, lives in New York and whom he has not seen for 15. He will see her now, on the occasion of the Barcelona Fashion Week, in which she participates.

He also has two grandchildren, whom he does not know.

She is supposed to meet them in December.

“My legs are shaking just thinking about it.”

His wife died of pneumonia when she was 37 years old.

Arturo and the girl found her dead in bed.

The anchorite of Santa Bárbara gives a hug.

Then come back.

To silence.

Return to Alcañiz along a goat track, car to Zaragoza and AVE Zaragoza-Madrid.

How curious.

In the "silent car" offered by Renfe, the racket is Olympic.

Three 20-year-olds euphorically comment on the weekend they have spent in Barcelona.

The man next door talks for about 20 minutes about who knows what the hell selling materials.

When she is given a look of open perplexity, he responds with another of menacing questioning.

It would be great to apply to them, if it existed, the “noise-breaking machine” invented by the writer José Ángel González Sainz in his book

From him, La vida small.

The art of escape

.

No one protests on the train.

Silent car.

Definitely, this country has no remedy.

But let's continue the journey.

The hyperactive journalist who went 'clack'.

A conversation with Sea Goat

On June 28, 2020, the journalist Mar Cabra, who won a Pulitzer Prize thanks to her work coordinating the investigation and publication of the so-called

Panama Papers

within the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ), wrote a article in EL PAÍS.

Its title:

When the mind falls slave to technology

.

In it, she recounted her particular via crucis as a consequence of what she openly calls "my addiction to technology."

It was the prelude to Mar Cabra's new life, which she decided, if she didn't turn off the switch, then modulate it to the point of changing her life.

She left Madrid and went to live in Aguadulce (Almería).

From noise to silence.

From the perfect storm to meditation.

Today, with the perspective of the passage of time and the radical change of uses and customs in her life, Mar Cabra remembers what happened like this: “Suddenly my body began to send me signals, I lost an ovary, I started with thyroid problems…, and in the middle of a summer vacation I said to myself: 'This cannot go on like this, I have to stop this wheel'.

I had already started to do meditation and had begun another path towards silence.

I started going every month on a silent and meditation retreat.

It was like when you come out of the water and your lungs go 'aaaahhh!'

But when we published the papers everything went crazy again.

She was on television all day, she gave talks, she traveled non-stop... she was once again involved in a dangerous inertia.

So, one day I allowed myself an hour of silence while I took a shower and there, yes, I already felt that I had to stop.

Although he maintains an important professional activity, it can be said that Mar Cabra changed his life.

“Yes, I got out of the way and started a path of rediscovery in which silence and meditation were key.

If I hadn't stopped, it would have had much worse consequences for my health.

I think we are not being aware of the damage that this rhythm and this noise are causing in our mental and physical health”.

Exteriors of a Taoist monastery in the Wudang mountains, in China.José Manuel Ballester

Health, wellness, meditation and compassion.

Natalia Martín Cantero and the “noise industry”

A journalist specializing in health, psychology and wellness issues, Natalia Martín Cantero has been dedicated for more than 20 years to receiving and teaching yoga and meditation classes and sessions, and is an instructor of training and cultivation of compassion for Stanford University ( USA), discipline that combines teachings of mindfulness, scientific studies and disciplines of compassion and self-compassion.

For years now, he has been coming regularly to Plum Village, the Buddhist center of the monk Thich Nhat Hanh (the Vietnamese Zen master who died in January and considered by many to be the most influential Buddhist monk after the Dalai Lama), in southwestern France, whose community belongs.

“Silence”, he reflects, “is the cornerstone of any contemplative tradition.

The 'noble silence' refers both to the physical form of not speaking and to inner silence… and to listening, which are two sides of the same coin”.

His strong convictions include a militant skepticism and a scathing critique of what he sees as "a great current opportunism around questions of mindfulness and meditation."

Is there an industry of silence?

"Rather what I think there is is an industry of noise," he clarifies, "and to counteract this there are people who constantly offer formulas and more formulas and sell their products very well, but I think that silence has nothing to do with it. with that".

In fact, with the pandemic, in his opinion, “many opportunists and many cantamañanas have emerged who take advantage of how people are, and it has been created, it is true, an industry of contemplation and fierce competition for the public ”.

Natalia Martín Cantero has it that clear: “Everything is for sale here…, and silence too”.

One of the escape routes in search of silence that today is causing a real furor in the offer of certain luxury hotel establishments are the so-called "forest baths".

It seems like a recent invention and yet… “I lived in San Francisco and left there in 2008. And at that time there were already hotels, schools and centers that offered people to go to the fields to see the wheat grow, and you paid your good money for it”, remembers Natalia Martín Cantero.

Blanca Portillo, in the general rehearsal of the monologue 'Silencio', directed by Juan Mayorga. Víctor Sainz

When 'Silence' takes the stage.

Juan Mayorga and Blanca Portillo: speechless

All the people who have participated in this report coincide in lamenting that concepts such as silence, listening or attention —of the latter, the writer and thinker Simone Weil made a true profession of faith— have been so cornered…, almost badly. seen.

Consequence in practical life: someone quiet is, rather than prudent or polite, someone suspicious.

Or bland.

Or coward.

Against this is 90% of the talk show class and we are, in general, very large plots of the media.

“There is a culture of invasion, a horror vacui that makes the time of silence, waiting and listening time lost..., it is a culture of narcissism and exhibition”, explains the playwright Juan Mayorga, who founded the silence his admission speech at the RAE and, from there, he wrote the monologue

Silencio

, who plays Blanca Portillo and who triumphs throughout Spain after having done it at the Spanish Theater in Madrid.

If you think of silence, you must think of the unsaid, and at this point Mayorga alludes to Walter Benjamin and his theory of translation and the untranslatable (

The translator's task

).

“He comes to say that what is important in a translation is precisely what is untranslatable in the source language, which challenges the target language to extend and deepen.

What it fundamentally attends to is what we do not understand about the other and, therefore, requires a particularly hospitable attitude, and the hospitable attitude par excellence is that of listening, but of course, that requires an effort”.

An effective metaphor —and not exactly comfortable for the viewer— of the overwhelming value that silence can contain are those four and a half minutes that Blanca Portillo amazingly interprets in the work of Juan Mayorga, and which allude to a composition (non-composition? ) by musician John Cage titled

4′ 33″.

A silent actress on stage for 4′ 33″.

This is how Portillo describes this challenge: “It is about sharing 4 minutes and 33 seconds of silence with the public of a theater, something that does not usually happen normally.

That becomes a communion.

And of course, there are people who feel uncomfortable.

At one function, a man shouted: 'How much is left?!!!'

Clearly there is an ingredient of provocation in that scene, also a warning to sailors: “It has a lot of provocation, of course, it is to draw attention to our lack of silence.

But from that four and a half minute scene, I can assure you that the following silences that occur in the theater are infinitely deeper than those that have occurred before.

The public enters another state”.

Word of Blanca Portillo, who confesses at the end of the conversation: "I'm looking forward to a silent retreat."


Cinema.

A quiet soundtrack

The growth of the seduction of silence in our days is exponential…, but the thing goes back a long way.

Thousands and thousands of believers, atheists, agnostics and half pensioners fell exhausted in 2005 before the disturbing beauty of a film like

The Great Silence

.

German director Philip Gröning shot it at the Grande Chartreuse Carthusian monastery in the French Alps.

He was able to do it 16 years after asking permission from the monks, who replied: "It's too soon, we'll call you."

The documentary, lasting almost three hours, remained for months in a Madrid cinema and won the European Film Award for Best Documentary.

The film has, incredible as it may seem, a soundtrack edited on disc: footsteps in the snow, the murmur of a fire, the work in the cell, the laughter of the monk at recreation time.

The soundtrack of silence.



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Source: elparis

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