It is as old as the world, and yet we are only now beginning to appreciate it. The silencethat space without sound that allows you to rest, disconnect from the environment and finally listening to oneself, is the last panacea of welfare. Whether in retreats of meditation As in different sessions and activities that replace outside noise with pleasant and relaxing sounds, therapies with the axis in acoustics are on the rise and attract more and more adherents.
calming sounds
Belén Ortega met the sound baths on a vacation in Tulum. After having tried almost all existing relaxation and meditation techniques, he decided to give this proposal a try. “And when he left he could not believe the state of physical and mental relaxation in which he was. An active calm, because I felt more revitalized than ever, ”she says. On his subsequent trips, he became accustomed to the practice, and soon began to learn to “play” these sound baths with teachers from different parts of the world, soaking up their benefits and effects. Today he offers his own sessions in the country in different luxury hotels and quiet spaces in the city (the last one was in the gardens of the Fernández Blanco Museum).
“In my sound baths, the Mayan instruments have a lot of prominence. For this, I learned to replicate the sounds of nature with a Mayan teacher”, he says. The frequency of the sounds is the same as that of the natural environment, so they relax easily even in the middle of the city. In these sessions, among other instruments, tuning forks are used to give different effects (to balance, relax, revitalize, etc.), a gong to help calm recurrent thoughts and Tibetan bowls and “hang drums” to physically relax. Through the different frequencies of sound, the brain waves slow down, moving from the waking state (beta) to the relaxed state (alpha) and deeper into the dream state (theta). “I always say that sound vibrations are like lullabies for the mind,” says Belén.
During the quarantine Ortega designed specially recorded audios so that the followers could continue taking their “baths” on a regular basis. “This is like the gym or yoga. Doing a session helps shake off the stress, but doing it regularly is what makes the benefits kick in,” he points out. Today many companies use this method in their work teams, to enhance creativity and at the same time mitigate the effect of “burnout” generated by the home office and work over-adaptation.
Another practice that involves silence and sounds, which has been on the rise for several years, especially among millennials, is the ASMR. It responds to the acronym Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response (Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response) and refers to the pleasant sensations that are generated when listening to certain everyday sounds in an amplified way. Its success among the youngest has to do with the platforms on which it is broadcast: YouTube or TikTok videos. They are usually slow and can last from minutes to hours and reflect the sounds of people while they perform different actions: putting on makeup, brushing, whispering, crumpling paper or cloth, arranging objects, etc. The amplification of the sounds generates a kind of tingling that produces calm and relaxation for many.
From Spotify they also account for this boom. ASMR playlists ranked high in 2021. The most listened to tracks are those of storm, calm rain or in the forest, crickets and even sounds of foggers, vacuum cleaners or fans. This psychological as well as physical experience proves to be especially helpful in inducing relaxation and falling asleep.
vibrate and meditate
For some time now, Tibetan bowls have been another much-sought treatment for their harmonizing power through sound. These are metal bowls that vibrate when struck or when moving around their edge, providing a vibration that is presented as healing. “In the natural state of health of the human being, all our frequencies vibrate in harmony, as in an immense symphony. But that state is easily lost due to stress, the rhythm of life and physical and emotional tensions, which lead to fatigue, pain and illnesses”, illustrates Patricia Bausano, a body therapist who applies this technique (@patriciabausano). For this reason, when the sound of the bowls flows through our body, it affects its vibration and allows a molecular rearrangement, since it acts on a certain frequency that the organism recognizes.
“Any type of energetic blockage, be it physical, mental or emotional, can be treated with sound. This creates a wave of frequency that manages to resonate and realign the energy on any of the levels. That is why it acts on the symptom and also on its origin”, details the specialist. The sessions last about 60 minutes and plunge the person into a state of deep relaxation.
And if we talk about silence, meditation is one of the most recurrent techniques. Increasingly practiced by all kinds of people, today there are even apps that teach how to enter this universe, silence the outside and listen to the internal voices. The author and priest Pablo d’Ors is a great disseminator of inner wealth through Friends of the Desert, the network he created to deepen contemplation. In addition, he is the author of “Biography of silence”, a book that has already exceeded 30 editions. “Friends of the Desert arises to alleviate the problem of noise and dispersion. We offer retreats and seminars, intensive periods to learn the practice of meditation and inner silence”, he detailed in a recent interview. With the desert as a metaphor for interiority, what he proposes is withdrawing from daily activity to find oneself, even if it is 20 minutes a day (and ideally, two or three days a year, in retreats). The main benefits that d’Ors details are living in a less self-centered way, with greater joy and less irascibility.
make friends with oneself
Silent retreats are another practice very much in line with this quest. They try to offer all the conditions for the mind to calm down and free itself from multiple stimuli for two to five days, in remote and intimate spaces. For the psychiatrist and psychoanalyst José Eduardo Abadi, these contemplation activities can be useful when what is being sought is a level of serenity and calm, a place “where we can be available to capture what until now we had not captured so much inside. like outside.” However, he adds, he does not consider that they should be the only instances of inner peace, but that it should be related to that silence every day, generating a space of relationship with oneself in which we can feel more authentic. “These withdrawals should not be an exceptional mode, but a permanent one,” he maintains. The idea, as Seneca said, is to be friends with oneself.
Finally, to achieve this stillness it is also necessary to put aside permanent contact with technology. The cell phones always on hand disperse from this connection. “We have to try that we have cell phones for our use, and not that the cell phones have us. Let it be a tool for a more effective contact, but let’s not suppose that it replaces the relationship with the other,” says Abadi. The healthier the distance, the deeper the connection with the best version of silence.
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