Sounds are a key component of sitting meditation and have a lot to teach us about the impermanent, transitory nature of our experience and our tendency to label things in our external landscape according to how they affect us; namely as being pleasant, unpleasant or of no concern. In this practice the invitation is just to try and notice and experience sounds as sounds, to listen carefully to what arises with curiosity rather than judgement.
Instructions
Several times a day, stop and just listen. Don’t scan for sounds; wait for them. Open your hearing 360 degrees. You might think of the difference between radar that goes out looking for something and a satellite dish with a wide range of pickup capacity that just sits in the backyard, waiting. Be a satellite dish. Stay turned on, but just wait. Listen to the obvious sounds, and the subtle sounds – in your body, in the building and outside. Listen with beginner’s mind, as if you had just landed from a foreign planet and did not know what was making those sounds. See if you can hear all the sounds as music being played just for you.
Reminders
You may like to set alerts at specific times of day to remind you to stop and pay attention to sounds or even more simply, put a drawing of an ear in various places in your home and workplace just as a visual cue to help you to stop and bring yourself into the present moment with your hearing.
Really looking forward to hearing your comments and please, feel free to use this blog as a place where you can discuss any aspect of practice. I’d also love to hear from people who have not posted before (as well as our esteemed regular contributors of course!) Take the plunge, it’s not as scary as you might imagine.
Spread the Word
Image courtesy of Ars Electonica
As I was walking home from the bus I felt a bit sorry for myself. I was very tired and I have a back and neck problem that was troubling me with a bit of pain. Then I came to think of this exercise. So I opened my ears to sounds and there were so many of them. I tried not to judge them but only listen and stay open. It was like discovering a new world of symphonies and my steps felt lighter at once!
I love listening to sounds too Lena, the way they bubble up to the surface and fade away. I find it gives me a very potent sense of spaciousness and belonging tempered with an insignificance that I find very comforting; I am really not that important, or as separate from other beings and objects as my egoic thoughts would lead me to believe…..I am just a bundle of constantly changing energies that, like everything else, is doing the best that it can, before returning to the earth of this world.
I too am enjoying this week’s practice. This one seems to come very naturally. Maybe it’s the sheer variety of sounds experienced in a day (or as Lena put it, the world of symphonies), or my musician’s ear. I like attempting to listen with curiosity rather than judgement, even with a 10 year old boy in the car singing “I know a song that will get on your nerves” at the top of his voice repeatedly for 10 minutes! When I quietened my judgement, I could hear one joyful, exuberant 10 year old and the laughter of my two children, and suddenly it became a humorous moment rather than an irritating one. And like James says, it faded away around the corner of the school building eventually…
Hi Sarah, a very warm welcome to the Embrace Blog. That’s a very interesting phrase of yours ‘when I quietened my judgement’ especially in the context of this practice. My judgements tend to have a clamouring, insistent, sonorous quality to them and that’s before they even come out into the fresh air! So, when I practice opening to sounds and being with my external landscape without judgement, I am creating a similar sense of space I believe, for the contents of my internal landscape: namely my thoughts, emotions and sensations.
My children, 10 and 6 at the time, had a car chant which they kept up for a good six months whenever we went on a trip, to much mirth and inane giggles….”Take me to the Teddy Bear Shop!”. There was no wretched teddy bear shop of course, which was precisely why they found it so funny! Thank you for reminding me of that:)
Finally here’s what an expert has to say about noises which create irritation…
from A Still Forest Pool: The Insight Meditation of Achaan Chah
Thanks for your kind welcome, James, and for your thoughtful response, and the Achaan Chah quote. I’m not sure if reminding you of the Teddy Bear Shop chant was a good thing or not! It made me smile (and also feel a little grateful that I only see the 10 year old singer of the Get on Your Nerves song once a week…) Yes I ‘quietened’ my judgement, externally silent, but not quite so silent internally. Still some work to do on letting the sounds just be sounds without bothering them (and thoughts just be thoughts etc).
Oh I wish I could listen to sounds during the day, not just during my meditation! I’ve had a particularly difficult day at work, but even when it’s an easy one it’s still hard to focus on anything other than what people are saying, telephones ringing, deadlines calling etc. May I say, though, that just dipping into your blog James and reading what the others have to say is in itself a quiet and lovely moment, a little bit of refuge that makes me feel quite different and instantly calmer. I must work at taking it with me.
Hi Susie, see if you can welcome the sounds of the office; frenetic telephones, conversation, the buzzz of work with the same sense of allowing and curiosity you bring to the sounds received in meditation. Other skillful responses to difficult experiences would be to choose to do something nurturing in that moment: a three minute breathing space, break, a walk outside the building, looking at the sky, a glass of water, etc etc.
Easier said than done of course, when deadlines are calling and the atmosphere is energetic! That’s why it’s called a practice.
……and part of that practice is to engage creatively with that wishing experience itself, noticing it, making space for it and giving it permission to be there. Acknowledging the desire, but knowing that given time, like everything else, this too shall exit stage left, particularly if we let it be.
It’s a pleasure Sarah – reminding me of the ‘Teddy Bear Shop’ was most definitely a good thing, lovely in fact. They are now 18 and 14 so TBS chants have fallen by the wayside, along with other childish joys.
A few months ago after many years of trying to find ways of stopping the incessant mental chattering ,it dawned on me that this continues mind babble was like a radio with no off button. How could i switch it off? I knew that no matter how i try i could not stop it for very long . At that particular moment my wife was listening to the radio in the next room , it didn’t bother me because i was not listening .
That was it !!!! If i’m really honest i had been listening to my mind and i did not have to, so i switched my sense of hearing to the outer real world .
Now my mental chatter has become like the radio in the background, of no consequence. I have refocused my hearing to the sounds of now , whatever that may be.
It does take practice the mind has a powerful draw , but it can be done.
Hi Fin, thank you for your post and welcome to the Embrace Blog. What a wonderful story and it demonstrates elegantly that what we experience from moment to moment, is in large part dependent on where we place our attention. We cannot switch off the mind babble necessarily, but we can learn through practice, not to invest in or attach to it so much. By moving our attention to the present moment experience of the sounds around us or any other present moment experiences such as the breath or the body, we can create some space for our thinking mind and hold the thoughts that we do have more lightly.
I was at a siting group a few days ago. It was in a very busy space and there was a lot of traffic noise. But this wasn’t my traffic, I didn’t have to worry about parking or congestion, I was here for just an hour or two.
In this place I actually found the traffic noise quite reassuring and soporific.
So it just gives me a pause for thought that when I come across the same noise in my home I do have the option to receive it in a different way.