“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!