Me (18 page)

With the swami I studied kriya yoga, a very passive type of yoga that has a lot to do with reflection. It isn’t a kind of yoga that requires a lot of physical exertion, but is instead a process of internal exploration. It was through this process that the swami helped me open the so-called kundalini—an evolutionary energy, invisible and immeasurable, that ascends through the spine, moving through the seven chakras of being. It’s pretty crazy, because supposedly through the practice of kriya yoga one will ultimately begin to hear the body’s natural sounds. According to the philosophy of kriya yoga, the body is full of sounds and fluids where energy comes and goes; what happens is that we, in our mad rush to live in the modern world, ignore them. But these bodily sounds are what they really call the sound of silence, which, once you hear it, can connect you with your own center, where you will find tranquillity, serenity, and peace.

Silence is really one single note, just one note. It is the sound you hear when you turn off all the lights and all the gadgets in your house, when you are alone and you lie down in your bed to sleep. What you hear in those moments is the sound of silence. And it is the sound that one seeks to hear through the practice. That is the note I am looking for in my meditation, the one that allows me to concentrate and removes me from everything around me. That is what the swami taught me.

When I arrived at this ashram, in that village by the sea in a corner of India, I didn’t know anything about this. I had traveled to India because I thought it was an interesting country, because I needed to rest, because the little yogi’s words awoke a curiosity in me. But I didn’t have the slightest clue what I was looking for. I didn’t imagine what I would learn. In fact, my vision was so simple that when I was told that the swami was a yoga master, I imagined he would teach me how to stretch or touch my big toe to my ear.

As we know it in the West, the practice of yoga has been completely commercialized. Today it is just another business, and anyone can become a yoga instructor just by paying several hundred dollars to become certified. But in India, the country where yoga was born, the people who teach it have spent entire lifetimes preparing to do so. Now, I am not saying that commercial yoga is a bad thing—if it works for you and gives you the peace and tranquillity you need, then carry right along. But because I had the good fortune to be able to learn from a sage who explained the whole philosophy on which it is based, this is the yoga that I practice.

I only spent four days with the swami on that trip, but those four days changed my life completely. Every day we would do a ceremony in which he would repeat various Sanskrit mantras with the purpose of helping me to find that divine sound, the sound of silence. Once you find the sound of silence and you are able to hear it in any situation, be it in a train station when you are surrounded by lots of people or alone in your room, you get closer to seeing the divine pendulum and feeling a divine vibration. The divine pendulum is something we always carry within; it is a frequency that moves from ear to ear when we close our eyes. Only through practice will you be able to appreciate this. And later, with more practice, you are able to feel the divine vibration that circulates throughout your whole body.

Everything begins with silence. Once you find the sound of silence, you are able to separate yourself from all that is physical and everything around you. That’s when you can advance to the next level—the divine vibration and the pendulum.

When he taught me this I not only believed that I found my center, but I also connected with the energy of the universe. He sat down next to me and placed his hand on my ears and I heard it right away—that high note that came from deep within me. Later the swami placed one hand on my spine and the other hand on my chest and asked: “Do you feel it?”

And in that precise moment, I felt the vibration. Later he put his hands on my eyes and I could see the pendulum, exactly as he had described it to me.

I thought, “What is this? This man is a magician!”

Later I tried to do it again on my own, but I couldn’t. So he said to me:

“Keep trying. Keep meditating, because with practice you will get there. With practice everything is possible. When the end comes, everyone will throw themselves to the ground and pray. When the chaos comes, when the world is coming to an end with tsunamis, hurricanes, and tornadoes, the people will all gather together and start to pray. That will be their way of facing what lies ahead. But you . . . you are going to sit and find the sound of silence. You will feel the divine vibration in your body and you will see the pendulum. The world may be crumbling around you, but you will be focused and in peace.”

Never again did I feel what I experienced with the swami, maybe for lack of practice, but what did remain vibrating inside me was his profound teaching. Applying what I learned on that trip, I feel that the real significance of his words was that it doesn’t matter how much noise or how many people may be around you; if you are balanced and in peace you can be sitting and talking with someone and still find the sound of silence. If you allow it, a police car can be passing right by you with the siren wailing at maximum volume, and you won’t even hear it. A plane can land on the roof of your house and you won’t even notice. That is the power of the sound of silence. As you hear it, you can disconnect from your body and at once connect with your soul.

Before going to India, I seldom spent time alone or in silence. When I walked into a room I would turn on the television right away, but not to watch it, just to have some company. The noise, the sounds, anesthetized me, and this way I kept myself far away from whatever was going on inside, as I was scared to see the ugly things I might discover. But when I returned from India, I began to search for the opposite. I wanted silence. I
needed
silence. Every morning I would spend thirty-five minutes to an hour practicing yoga and meditation, and I’d do the same in the afternoons. Those moments became a sacred portion of my day, and knowing that I had them helped me to feel calmer when I was in the midst of all the chaos. They taught me to face myself, so that I could begin to destroy, one by one, the very fears that made me escape from my own truth.

Unfortunately, when I had been home for a while, I went back to my old routines. If I normally gave myself thirty minutes to an hour to meditate, slowly that turned into twenty, then ten, until I stopped meditating altogether. Could it be that those moments in silence brought me too close to my truth, the truth that I would sooner or later have to face? Maybe. But if anything is obvious, it is that it still was not my time.

MY SECOND ENCOUNTER with the magical teachings of India came at the end of 2000. I had been working incessantly for two years: Since my last trip to India, I’d had the Grammy Awards, the release of
Ricky Martin
(in English), the success that came from “Livin’ La Vida Loca,” the recording of
Sound Loaded
, and all of the promotional work for that second album in English. Now I was in the midst of my time off, not really knowing what it was I wanted to do next.

Once again, I didn’t have much time to think about the matter because destiny had already mapped out my next step. One day while I was at home—one of those days when I was feeling particularly sad and listless—I got a call from a colleague who was living in India.

“Ricky, I want you to see what I am doing in Calcutta,” he said to me. “I have started an orphanage for girls.”

During those days I wasn’t in the mood for anything. All I wanted was to stay locked up at home in my pajamas, watching films, listening to music, and sleeping. Today I realize how badly I was really doing; I see photographs taken of me during that period and I almost don’t recognize myself. My eyes are glassy—they look completely empty—and my smile looks completely fake.

However, the prospect of going to India gave me a jolt. I don’t know—maybe it was because of the deep sense of peace I had felt there before, or because I was starting to connect with myself, but something inside me made me say, “You have to do this.” It was almost as if, on some organic level, I knew what awaited me there.

“Wonderful!” I said to him with a renewed sense of enthusiasm. “I’m coming!”

Within days I was boarding a plane to Calcutta. I arrived in India, but this time I was not remotely ready to find what I discovered.

The orphanage was a stunning place, beautifully painted and decorated, and it had plenty of room to play and study. There was a music school and a primary and secondary school; and they offered cooking classes for those who didn’t want to study. . . . The place was a dream. When I finished my tour, I said to my friend, “What you have here is a Disney World for girls!”

My friend founded a fantastic institution that offers care and education to helpless girls in Calcutta. The work he has done there is incredible and completely inspiring. He is dedicated to rescuing girls from the most dangerous streets in the city and offers them a place to live, an alternative to their way of life.

My friend didn’t care that I had just arrived, that I might be tired and have a case of jet lag: He immediately asked if I wanted to come with him to go rescue more girls from the street. And even though I didn’t really understand how we were going to do it, I of course accepted.

We set out to explore the streets. We went to all the corners of Calcutta’s poorest neighborhoods, and we walked through long and dirty streets, moving through the throngs, looking for abandoned girls, or worse. It was shocking to see the places where they tend to live. In the slums of Calcutta, four branches and a piece of plastic are a house, and you are lucky if you have the piece of plastic to shelter you from the rain. Many people don’t. I asked my friend, “Why do you only rescue girls? Why does the center only have girls, and not boys? Don’t boys need help, too?”

“For better or worse, the boys of Calcutta survive,” my friend explained to me. “They beg or work or figure out a way to survive one way or another. The girls are also strong and resourceful, but they are often forced into prostitution, which is what I am trying to avoid.”

“But how can it be?” I asked him. “We’re talking about girls who are no more than four or six years old. . . . How can it be?”

“Unfortunately, that’s how it is,” he responded. “It’s horrible, but the reality is that it happens all the time. There are men who are willing to pay in order to rape a four-year-old girl.”

He didn’t have to say another word.

We combed those neighborhoods until we found a group of beggars, exactly the type of girls who were at risk of falling into child prostitution. There were three girls and their mother. They lived under a plastic bag that was nailed to a concrete wall, and the other side was tied to a tree. It was raining and there, under that tiny improvised roof, were the mother and her three daughters, one of whom was very ill. There was no time to lose. With the help of a boy who translated everything into Bengali, we explained the situation to the mother: why we believed that her daughters were at risk, what might happen, and the alternative we could offer through the foundation. She understood and agreed, so we took the mother and the three daughters with us—including the one who was sick—and we quickly rushed them back to my hotel.

But when we arrived, people looked at us with disgusted looks on their faces. Of course, it was an elegant hotel and it bothered them to see at least ten Westerners walk into this refined atmosphere with a group of beggars. But I was so worried about them that I didn’t care about the stares as I walked in holding two girls in my arms, with the mother behind me carrying the little girl who was sick. A girl who also worked as a volunteer at the orphanage, and who later became a very close friend, said to them, “They are my guests,” and that would have to do.

The hotel staff obviously did not like it at all that I was taking them to my room, but I think that because of a mixture of hospitality and respect, their only option was to let me do as I pleased. Upon arriving at my room, we called for the hotel doctor, who came up right away. But when the man entered my room and saw who his patients were, he said, “Dear Lord! What is this?”

“Well,” I said, “these are three girls and their mother, and one of them needs your help—she is very sick.”

The three girls were all bitten up by rats. The two older ones were dirty and very thin, but they were in relatively good shape. However, the little one, who was approximately four or five years old, looked like she was on the brink of death. Her eyes would roll back and she was as limp as a rag doll.

I looked at the doctor.

“We have to give the little one something,” I said to him. “I don’t know what she has, but please do something.”

The doctor wouldn’t even get close to the little girl.

“Okay,” he said, pointing at a nearby napkin, “please take that rag and clean her up.”

“But, sir!” I said to him. “If it was a matter of cleaning her up, I would have done so myself a long time ago. What I need is for you to examine her and tell me what she has. I need you to check her eyes, her ears, her temperature . . . whatever you have to do to tell me if she is ill or if it’s an infection—just tell me what it is!”

But he still wouldn’t touch her.

“It’s just that I don’t know . . . ,” he said.

“Look!” I said, this time more firmly. “I have antibiotics that I brought with me from the United States. I can give them to her. But I am not a doctor, and I need you to tell me what it is that she needs!”

“I don’t know...,” this man who called himself a doctor kept saying.

I couldn’t take it anymore and I said, “You know what? We don’t need you. Please leave.” He turned and left shamelessly. He simply grabbed his things and rushed out the door, thanking me as he left.

I couldn’t believe it. I had always believed that a doctor’s duty was to save lives, all lives that needed saving, but this “doctor” was apparently only a doctor to those he felt like being a doctor to. According to the caste system in India, those girls and their mother are labeled “untouchables” (the lowest caste), and even in a life-or-death situation, that doctor was not going to touch them. The hierarchy of the castes is a concept that is deeply entrenched in Indian culture and has a reason for being, despite the fact that I cannot understand it. That’s how it is. I am not judging it in any way. It’s just that because of the way I was raised, and the many things I have seen in this world, I just can’t comprehend it.