BUENOS AIRES, ARGENTINA – In the corner of her home, Samara Pascual, 40, starts her day meditating.
Unlike many families in Buenos Aires, Argentina’s capital, Pascual and her husband don’t rush to wake up, get dressed and fight traffic in order to get to work on time. Instead, they take their time and sink into a 30-minute meditation every morning.
The tall and thin blonde sits on the floor with her eyes half-closed and her legs crossed alongside her husband in their spacious apartment with colorful paintings on the walls. Their 5-year-old son is still fast asleep.
Pascual, a piano and music theory teacher, says that they have been practicing this routine for many years.
“The meditation began by chance,” she says. “I had a singing student, and she told me, ‘Do you know there is a Buddhist center in your building?’ I was not aware.”
Pascual visited the center, where she learned about Kadampa meditation, a tradition of Mahayana Buddhism. She says it has changed her perception of reality and has modified her mind.
“I began to meditate, and I realized how it changed the perception of my mind,” she says while joining the tips of all her fingers on her right hand and pointing to the center of her chest. “When you sit down to meditate, it changes your mind.”
She says that normally, the mind is unconscious and erratic. It has continuous thoughts that don’t have solutions.
“Our mind is chaotic,” she says.
Developing the habit of meditation is a lengthy process that requires perseverance, she says.
“In order to meditate, you need to know how to do it and, after, perseverance and understanding that meditation is like the practice of a sport,” she says. “Little by little, you advance. We find it difficult to concentrate, but you have to be perseverant. With time, you achieve your mind calming more quickly.”
The practice of collective meditation is a growing phenomenon among residents of Buenos Aires, where more and more people are convening for outdoor meditations. Meditators say that it generates positive individual changes that later reverberate on a social level for the benefit of the community.
Meditation schools have become prevalent in Buenos Aires. Posters offering meditation courses hang on the walls of small buildings and grand institutions alike throughout the city. People hand out fliers on street corners inviting passersby to lower their stress levels and to improve their quality of life through meditation.
The organization Meditación Masiva Argentina comprises a group of individual meditators who promote collective meditation. Through social networks, they encourage people to convene in a public park to meditate together four times a year.
Adriana Inés Ginatto, one of the organizers of Meditación Masiva Argentina, says that the group formed at the end of 2001 when it succeeded in gathering about 20 people at each of its meetings. Nowadays, the group’s meditations draw about 500 participants. The most recent one was Oct. 28, and the next will take place Dec. 2.
Meditación Masiva Argentina doesn’t have an official status or follow a particular school of meditation. It’s simply a group of citizens who gather to meditate. As the group doesn’t have funds or receive subsidies, attendees contribute to a collection box at each gathering in order to pay the city government to use the public space.
“What interests us is uniting meditators of all techniques and from any place with one objective: to achieve a critical mass in order to elevate the consciousness of the inhabitants of the land,” Ginatto says. “It is a very diverse group but united with the same objective. There are no ages or conditions.”
In September, an outdoor collective meditation in a large park in the city called Bosques de Palermo also showed the growing numbers drawn to this practice. Local media reported that some 100,000 people gathered to meditate. It was the first massive meditation organized by the city government.
The Art of Living, a nonprofit organization that operates globally, carried out the event. The organization’s founder, Sri Sri Ravi Shankar, an Indian guru, traveled to Buenos Aires to lead the 20-minute meditation.
“Meditation is a tool in order to have a body without sicknesses, a liberated mind and a heart free of sadness,” Shankar said through a translator to the crowd gathered at the park.
The image of thousands of people repeating the monosyllabic “om” in unison reverberated not only within the park, but also on television screens throughout the country. The Art of Living led collective meditations on the same day in 200 cities around the world.
Pascual explains the force of this collective meditation.
“When we are meditating in a group, it creates a very positive and inspiring energy,” she says. “Each one is in his or her place with the eyes half-closed. It creates a silence and an atmosphere, but each one is inside, with one’s own control.”
She says it’s an individual yet social experience.
“Each one has his or her own experience and his or her own perception,” she says. “That’s why it’s possible that many people are in the same moment, in the same place, but they perceive, they grasp and they live different things.”
Before the collective meditation, the government organized eight days of related activities at various points in the city, including discussions and conferences. Different schools with various philosophical currents offered information about their programs and courses.
One of the organizations was Brahma Kumaris, a global university that has been offering courses and seminars on meditation in Argentina for 30 years.
Sandra Marcuso, who works for the organization, says there is a strong need for organizing activities linked to instropection to align with the spiritual condition of human beings.
“The spiritual necessity increases as the condition of the people worsens,” she says. “Or it’s when the soul feels that it hit rock bottom, so it wakes up and needs to explore the essence of being.”
Marcuso says that meditation benefits people in four main ways. The breathing used in meditation affects the physical body by strengthening the immune system, organ function and the nervous system; improving quality of sleep; and decreasing stress. The emotional benefits include cultivating self-esteem, patience, emotional stability and good humor. Meditation also offers mental benefits, such as clarity of thinking, creativity, concentration and memory increase. Finally, meditation carries spiritual effects by generating a sense of unity with all creation.
Pascual says that through her Buddhist teachings, she has learned that everything depends on the mind and that this also reflects on a collective level. When the minds of individual people that form a society are restless, that also has consequences on a social level.
“Our actions are preceded by a thought,” she says. “Each action that I carry out has an effect and is going to come to light in some moment.”
So it’s necessary to have a centered mind that generates actions in line with this mental state, she says.
“It’s clear that if I can change my mind, my perceptions are going to change, and my world is going to change,” she says.
The possibility of generating a collective change at the base of all spiritual work was one of the messages that Shankar emphasized during the collective meditation.
“If you create in your environment a feeling of belonging, the violence will begin to decrease in your surroundings,” he said. “Although, this can’t occur if your mind is full of divisions and prejudices. It requires honesty, humility and sincerity.”
The Indian guru called those gathered at the collective meditation “to work for peace and to work for community.” He encouraged attendees to volunteer an hour of community work daily.
Sandra Ariela, a girl with long blond hair, blue eyes and a nose piercing who participated in the mass meditation, supported Shankar’s call.
“It seems positive to me that there are so many people meditating and also the call to the vocation of work,” she says. “One can make a difference through the volunteering proposed.”
Next to her, Lucía Sálice, another participant, expressed her hope that people will heed the call for community work.
“God wants community work to be able to function,” she says. “It depends on everyone.”
Pascual says she hopes collective meditation can help people to understand that they have the option to choose between suffering and happiness and to treat reality like a choice.
“Happiness is a mental state,” she says. “And it’s not on the outside, it’s in our mind. It means that we have to initiate the search and to understand that we have the potential to be happy and the potential of suffering.”
