“Do not speak unless you can improve the silence..” Buddhist Saying

Yesterday was Armistice Day 11/11/11 and I along with many others, chose to mark the eleventh hour in silence. I was seeing a woman  in her hospital bed at the time – as part of my work with Friends of the Beatson-  and with her agreement, we both sat in quiet contemplation at 11 o’clock, each of us remembering in our own private way. Hospitals are not the quietest of places but let me tell you, those two minutes seemed to become the noisiest two hospital minutes in history! There were vacuum cleaners, other patients chatting, IV pumps alarming, buzzers going off, doors banging, phones ringing, nurses shouting…Of course, hospitals cannot choose to observe an official silence. The needs of patients go on no matter the hour or the date, so it was understandable. It also helped me to understand why so many patients come to see me because they can’t sleep – I tend to advise earplugs along with the breathing and meditation - but it led me to thinking about the nature of silence. 

 Like 11 o’clock on the 11th day of the 11th month, we hold moments of silence as special times, to honour a particular memory or to offer a prayer or moment’s contemplation. But moments of silence can be rare throughout the rest of our lives. Human beings don’t seem particularly comfortable with silence and we fill our lives with noise, often switching on a radio or television at home simply to be a noise in the background. Silence is so unusual that even in official one or two minute silences, you often continue to hear a faint ripple of voices in the backround. 

Nowadays it is so easy to fill every waking moment with sound from TV, radio, MP3s and conversation on our mobile phones, it seems there are very few places to sit and be quiet. No wonder so many people seek out silence in yoga and meditation. Even yoga classes are not immune from noise though! My current Glasgow location is opposite a busy petrol station, which has a supermarket and, noisiest of all, a bottle bank! You can almost set your watch by the person who comes to smash their week’s worth of empties just as we are about to start relaxation! 

What is so great about Yoga however is that with regular practice, the noise can become unimportant. Yes, it is wonderful to practice yoga or meditation in a quiet place but when you live in a city, this isn’t always possible. Even in the countryside, where the noises are less urban, it can still be a pretty noisy place – my meditation is often accompanied by the sound of a bulldozer v oyster catcher soundtrack.  I remember when I was doing my first teacher training in India and they taught us that we should and would be able to meditate just about anywhere. Peaceful and beautiful as it was, the Ashram was surrounded on the outside by all of the unique sounds of India: including tinny temple loudspeakers and the hum of auto rickshaw engines to add to the more harmonious sound of birds and monkeys. For good measure, there was also a safari park nearby and the roaring of the park lions just added to the cacophony. 

 They were right. After a month of yoga and meditation, the noise became irrelevant. 

When we invite the body and the mind to become still we can begin to allow whatever is around us that we would otherwise consider to be distracting, to simply be, without wanting or needing it to be different. Through yoga and meditation we can touch the stillness of knowing inner silence. And what is even better – we can begin to carry this inner silence over into our noisy lives!

Those of you who stray onto this blog will know about my love/hate/love relationship with technology. I do like a gadget and the latest techie toys cause more than a flicker of desire. But, as a lover of all things green I know that I should try to reuse and then recycle wherever possible. So, even if  I could afford to buy these shiny new things, I would try and curb my gadget loving tendencies and think about what I really need rather than what catches my magpie eye!

 Oh but it’s  not easy though is it? We are surrounded by stuff and bombarded with advertising and forced, sometimes to buy new things because of “progress” and the built-in obsolescence of consumer goods. When your vacuum stops vacuuming – you’ve got to get a new one. We can blame greed or rampant consumerism or whatever, but I think it’s much simpler than that. I think things promise us happiness. We all know the false reality of this promise, but we buy into it because that’s the culture we live in. New clothes, new car, new house, new bank account, new mobile phone, new wallpaper, new TV, new Yoga mat…

The Digital switchover which happened last week  brought this into sharper focus for me when we were suddenly left without a TV signal – clinging as we were to the last days of analogue!  You see, one of the things we have resolutely continued to use  is our old telly. Well – someone else’s old telly (gotta love Freecycle) Then the screen went blank. We paused to enjoy the silence and then a Freeview box was hurriedly acquired ( Freecycle comes to the rescue again) and normal service resumed.

Televisions and digital set top boxes are freely available at the moment as most people seem to be getting themselves new flat screen, HD ready, digital TVs.  So we’re OK for televisions for a wee while longer. Our “old style” TV (as the big tellies are now known) works perfectly well and when it stops working we have another in reserve. We are grateful to those people on Freecycle who did the right thing and allow someone to reuse their TVs before they were forced to take them to the recycling centre.  I was quite shocked today when I took my recycling to our local centre and saw skips and skips full of electronic equipment and lots of tellies, most of which looked OK to me.  One enterprising soul was having a good old rake for goodies – although our beloved health and safety don’t really allow it!

 Did you know that in Britain we throw away over 1 Million tonnes of electronic equipment every year? That’s a heck of a lot of stuff!  The WEEE directive requires this all to be recycled now and there are companies who strip out old televisions and computers and recycle the various raw materials – copper, glass, etc. The glass, which can’t be used for anything else, goes to make more televisions…

…Must be good for the planet – right?

 Despite measures to recycle, across the globe thousands of tonnes of discarded electronic equipment and their components find there way into landfill and waste dumps. The pollutants that are released from these products find their way from the land environment and into the marine environment, so that at the top of the food chain animals such as seals can have contamination levels millions of times higher than the water in which they live. And polar bears, which feed on seals, can have contamination levels up to 3 billion times higher than their environment (source: WWF)

Some of you may have caught the Channel 4 programme Inside Nature’s Giants, about Polar Bears?  Amongst the many environmental threats that face Polar bears is the huge amount of toxic pollution that they are ingesting, causing wide ranging physiological issues to an already threatened species. And a big source of the pollutants the scientists are finding? Waste electronics.

 Be proud to reuse old stuff. To hell with fashion.  And when the digital police come round to your house – declare that your TV’s not OLD it’s RETRO!