martin laird

You should be meditating.

/ antonioyrocinante / 2 Comments

Stop, inhale, focusing on the air entering your nostrils or your lungs. Exhale, focusing on the air leaving your lungs or your nostrils. There, you did it!! For a brief time, you didn’t worry about what’s for dinner, your bills, the weather, what you were going to tell your boss, your customer, or your friend. You didn’t think about politics, and you weren’t scrolling through social media. You had a moment —albeit a very short one—of meditation. The trick is to do that exact exercise with your breathing for 5, 10, 20 minutes, or half an hour. The longer you do it, and the more often you do it, the better you will feel.

My dear friend Paco encouraged me to try meditating while I was in a deep, dark depression over ten years ago. It was not easy for a hyperactive fellow like me to embrace it, but now I cannot live without some quiet time every day. And although I have written about meditation here before, it was usually in passing while talking about health and mental health in general.

This all comes to mind because I recently had the opportunity to see and hear Paco give a presentation on Christian Meditation at the Antonio Azorín bookstore in El Escorial. He filled the room and had a wonderful talk. I originally thought the attendees were curious about meditation, but during the Q&A, I realized some of them were very advanced, although from different “schools” of meditation —see below.

There are many labels for meditation, just like there are many different philosophies and methods: Mindfulness Meditation, Mantra Meditation, Zen Meditation (Zazen), Vipassana Meditation, Transcendental Meditation (TM), or Body Scan Meditation. The ancient Fathers and Mothers of the desert, the early Christians, also developed a method of meditation which nowadays is called Christian meditation, or even centering prayer. Some recent Catholic proponents of meditation might be Thomas Keating, Thomas Merton, or Richard Rohr.

Whichever way you choose to sit down in silence is fine. Of course, nowadays you can use an app on your phone to time your sits, or to guide you. I have been using Insight Timer for years, and I love it!

Every class I teach at school starts with one minute of silence. This time is a buffer between whatever the students were doing before and class, between English and Spanish; it is a moment to regroup, to breathe, and for me, it is a minute of meditation.

Recently, Maria Popova also wrote about the importance of spending time alone and in silence, not exactly meditation, but close to it. Check it out here.

So carve out a few minutes from your day: when you wake up, before you go to sleep, in the middle of the day, or, paradoxically, if you are really busy, more than once a day. Whatever works for you, sit down, and start focusing on your breathing. You are welcome.

Oh, you should definitely check out this video of Villanova’s Fr. Martin Laird on the benefits of meditation. It is a bit long, but worth it!!

On the importance of silence.

/ antonioyrocinante / Leave a comment

Here is a paradox: We are surrounded by silence, and yet we choose not to listen to it. Our lives are lived at full volume all the time. Our devices keep chiming, beeping, buzzing. My new pet peeve is when you are having a conversation with someone, and they keep looking at their (smart?) watches to see all the notifications coming in. They might be physically in front of you enjoying (¿?) a coffee, but their attention is on everything coming into their watches!

I like to think of myself as a minimalist (although my recent move demonstrates that I am not very good at it –although I try). I live alone, no TV, no pets, and yet I make my breakfast watching the previous night’s newscast on my tablet. I check out the news, this blog’s stats, incoming emails, the weather, Facebook and Instagram (follow me on Tonxob) on my different devices a few times a day. But I do try to listen to the silence: more and more: in the car I do not turn on the radio nor CD (yes, it is old like me), I do not listen to my earphones at the gym nor when I am running, walking or paddling, and of course I meditate a few times a day, where one is dealing with the noise inside the head. In the mornings I walk across campus to make myself a coffee, and that five minute walk by the pond has enough silence to carry me until lunch. In my classes we start with a minute of silence, just to center ourselves and transition to Spanish. You have to make the effort to find the silence or the noise will eat you up!

This post comes about because one of my students recently asked me to help him with an independent study translating Cuando todo calla, El silencio en la Biblia by my colleague and exiled Bishop of Managua Silvio Baez. I also recently picked up Shusaku Endo’s novel Silence, just because of the title!

But I crave silence. I miss the school assemblies at Seacrest Country Day school when we would sit in a Quaker circle and only speak if we were so inspired (although it was not a religious school). I miss the silence of the Camino, of the Paular Monastery.

It takes practice to listen to the silence, oh but the rewards, the clarity, the peace are totally worth the effort. Try it!

Here is a beautiful video on the rewards of listening to silence. It is Villanova’s Fr. Martin Laird’s chat : Out of silence something is born that leads to silence itself. It is a bit long, but definitely worth it