For a long time, pausing was seen as a threat to performance. Stopping meant falling behind, losing momentum, or missing opportunities. But something started to move: In the midst of noise, fatigue and hyperconnection, a new sensitivity is making its way that vindicates silence.slowness and rest as forms of self-care.
A vital pause
The song is so popular that it even made it to the best-seller lists. “Biopause” (Editorial El Ateneo)the book by the therapist and ontological coach Gisela Gilgesbecame a wellness phenomenon. With clear and familiar language, he proposes rethinking the pause as a biological and emotional need: that moment in which the body or soul says “I can’t continue like this.” For Gilges, this limit is not a failure, but an opportunity for reunion. “Stopping is not failing, it is choosing,” he summarizes.
From his experience with hundreds of patients, he detected a pattern: fatigue, insomnia, contractures, irritability or anxiety without apparent cause are usually the first warnings of a biopause, a pause that has no age or diagnosis but comes to remind us that living fast is not living more, but less present. “The body does not want to get sick, it warns beforehand. The important thing is to read the whispers before they become screams.”he explains.
The author insists that pausing does not mean abandoning or getting off the world, but rather inhabiting it again. Talk about micro-breaks: closing your eyes and smelling the coffee, feeling the water in the shower, looking at something without your cell phone in your hand. Small gestures that restore coherence between mind and body. In a culture that measures value in productivity, taking a break is almost an act of resistance. “Before we knew how to live better. Today, pausing is telling the system: my value does not depend on how much I produce, but on how I feel while I do it.”
The body breathes
Yoga teacher and author of the book “Yoga off the mat” (Editorial El Ateneo), Erica Di Cione has been teaching for years that well-being does not begin with perfect posture, but with the ability to record what happens to us. “Pausing in the middle of everyday life is like pressing the recalculate button“, he points out. In the daily whirlwind, he assures, we stop feeling to only react. The mind runs, the body accompanies and the soul remains behind waiting for us to look at it again. The pause, on the other hand, allows us to ask ourselves how we are, what we need, what we want to let go of to make room for the new.
From his point of view, stopping is a way to feel again. When we never stop, the body continues to function, but it is filled with cortisol, the stress hormone, and becomes energetically saturated. “We get used to tension as if it were natural, and we confuse movement with vitality.” For this reason, yoga does not seek immobility, but rather conscious movement: each asana is a meditation in itself, a training to be able to remain still without discomfort. “Bodily silence does not mean stopping doing, but rather moving in the presence“, says.
Breathing, he adds, is the bridge that unites body and mind. Consciously regulating it allows us to calm, activate or balance depending on what we need. That is why he proposes a minimal, almost invisible practice: three seconds of pause three times a day. Close your eyes, inhale carefully and exhale, releasing tension. A simple way to return to the present, recalculate and continue, but from a more conscious, subtle and alive place.
That same search goes through Nicolás Iglesias, psychologist, Buddhist practitioner and author of ““Meditation in sneakers” (Southern Leaves). His proposal is based on a simple idea: bring the practice to real life, without candles, mantras or impossible postures. Three years ago, out of a personal concern, he proposed to his teacher, Gerardo Abboud, to open a space for secular mindfulness every Monday at 7 pm. “I was already working as a psychologist and I realized how much meditation had given me. I asked myself what I had given back to the practice that transformed me so much,” he says. What started as a test became a stable meeting, where people of different ages come in search of serenity, relief from stress or simply a refuge in the midst of daily chaos (entrance is free, it is possible to register on Instagram @nicoiglesiass).
“The axis is that we are all in the same thing. The strength of the group is what sustains it.” point. In that space, meditation works as a concrete tool for emotional regulation: it helps focus attention, calm the mind and regain clarity. For Iglesias, the pause is not a static image of someone motionless with their eyes closed, but rather an internal attitude that can manifest itself while performing such everyday acts as watering the plants. “I have seen Tibetan lamas do it with immense serenity. The pause is not in stopping moving, but in being at peace while something happens.”
That serenity, he says, comes from transforming the relationship with what happens to us. “Meditation makes us kinder, less reactive. It gives us a space between stimulus and response, and that is where true freedom appears.” But stopping is not easy: “It is difficult for us because it confronts us with emptiness, with the idea of finitude. When nothing happens, we feel a mini-death, a great discomfort. And we try to cover it with stimuli, consumption, movement. But matter always fails,” he warns. Learning to stay in that silence is to conquer an internal territory that the modern rhythm denies us.
intimate ritual
In a reading key, the pause takes shape in “Silence”a traveling silent reading event created by Hannah Leyro Díaz and Julieta Brenna. Both came from different projects, but they agreed on a simple desire: to offer a space to read without distractions, without screens and without the pressure to comment later. An analogue ritual to stop the noise, at least for a while.
The first edition was held in Flores Negras, an old house converted into a nursery. Regular readers and others who had not touched a book for a long time participated. For 40 minutes, no one spoke or looked at their cell phone, only the sound of pages turning could be heard. “From the first bell, the space became a shared oasis,” they say. In the end, the transition from silence to talk was slow: some continued reading, others stayed talking with a gin and tonic in hand. That collective calm, they say, was the biggest surprise.
“Silence” It is defined as “an analog afternoon, a reading ritual.” It does not have social networks and it spreads by word of mouth, almost like a secret that is shared among those seeking refuge. In hyperconnected times, they propose a luminous paradox: reading (that intimate and solitary act) in company. Perhaps that is why many leave the meeting with a particular feeling. Not of isolation, but of connection. With others, with the word and, above all, with oneself.
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