Category: ayurveda

Article by Fiora Touliatou

“Listen to Silence. It has so much to say.”

Rumi, 13th century Persian poet

Since ancient times, ascetics from different spiritual practices have spent significant amounts of time in silence and isolation, either with prayer or meditation. Even nowadays, monks and spiritual practitioners retreat themselves for days without socialising or talking to anyone. Throughout history, artists and musicians always had the tendency to spend time on their own in order to connect to inspiration and creativity. Nowadays, many meditation teachers advise that frequent meditative pauses throughout the day have poweful healing effect to our body, mind and soul regardless of our spiritual beliefs. So what is the significance of silence in our lives?

Modern science has proved that noise is destructive to us while silence is healing us. Various studies have shown that noise has a powerful physical yet destructive effect on our brains, because it causes the release of stress hormones. Actually, not only our brain, but our whole energetic field, our aura, receives noise as disruptive sound waves. Even when we are sleeping our body receives noise as intrusive and threatening to our system, therefore it reacts with releasing stress hormones. Consequently, living in a consistently noisy environment causes high levels of stress and can even lead to high blood pressure, heart disease, tinnitus and insomnia.

In 2006, physician Luciano Bernardi studied the physiological effects of noise and music. He surprisingly made a very important discovery. During the study, the participants were not only exposed to noise and music, but also to random stretches of silence in between. These pauses were far more relaxing for the brain of the participants than the relaxing music. In fact, these ‘irrelevant’ pauses became the most important aspect of the study as they had the most powerful and relaxing effect.

In 2011, the World Health Organisation (WHO) stated that the root cause of 3,000 heart disease deaths in Western Europe was due to excessive noise.

All these facts and other important studies and practices are a proof that taking time to switch off is crucial to our wellbeing and our lives in general.

According to the “attention restoration theory”, when we are in silence, the brain can recover some of its cognitive abilities. Moreover, according to Imke Kirste, a Duke University regenerative biologist, two hours of silence per day can initiate cell development in the hippocampus, our brains center of our memory and senses.

Unfortunately, in our modern digital world, our brains have minimal time to switch off as we are exposed to enormous amounts of information. Modern life demands our brains to be in constant attention and consequently a lot of stress. This mental overload leads us into difficulties with making decisions, solving problems and daily functions. However, when we switch off and ideally spend time alone in silence, our brain is finally able to relax, release this constant focus and start its healing process.

To conclude, silence replenishes and nourishes our cognitive powers, raises our concentration levels, increases our motivation and helps us connect with our centres and balances us emotionally. Hence, as ancient spiritual masters always taught, silence is healing as it connects us deeply into ourselves and balances our body, mind and soul. The simple yet ancient practice of silence might be the healing balm we all need to cope with our modern lifestyle.