This meditation is a home-grown one, developing from my personal experiences after the opening. It centers on auditory input; for reasons I don’t completely understand, the hearing sense is the one that most easily draws me into a deep meditative state. Perhaps this is partly due to the fact that listening is a wider, more radial and more passive sense engagement than sight. By radial, I am suggesting a circular correspondence and meaning that the consciousness occupies a central stance in relation to the input, which can in a sense surround one. One is not actively grasping after or pushing forward towards some specific object in the sensory field. I’ve termed the latter “focused” consciousness in my thinking about the matter. Nor does attention fixate on a specific object of sense with listening as easily as can happen with sight. I’ve found this meditation works most effectively with natural sounds – rain storms or gentle thunderstorms, birds in the neighborhood, winds in the trees, waves on the beach, the sound of rushing streams and rivers – but it can also work well with man-made sounds in the environment, provided those sounds do not disturb a certain serene pose in one’s meditation. For example, one of my favorite sounds to employ with this meditation is the sounds of train horns in the distance.
Being outdoors is ideal if possible for this meditation, but there are other ways it may be engaged. CDs or tapes of nature sounds, widely available for sale, can serve the purpose. Lacking any stereo or auditory equipment, one can also find clips via the Internet (Youtube is a popular source) than can give multiple hours of sound input if desired. Shorter clips can be looped if necessary. Note that I do not recommend most music for this exercise. Music certainly has its place in spiritual practice, but this isn’t it. Music is too directed, too focused on the evocation of a particular mood, and too particularized in its details to lead into the state desired; it tends to engage the active mind rather than the awareness. What we are after is a set of sounds that have a certain random quality to them, those that behave like white or brown noise.
Step-by-step
- Close the eyes to begin and center your being. Focus on the inner core, beginning with the space in the middle of the head, followed by the space in the spine immediately behind the heart, and lastly the space in the pelvic floor deep between the sit bones. Link these three spaces together in your awareness and maintain the linkage through the breath. Breathe all the way up and down through your core a few times.
- Once the access to your core has stabilized, open your eyes and turn your hearing focus softly to the auditory input serving as the root of the meditation. Remaining in your core, make a connection with the sound you are hearing. Listen. Attend to it without grasping, without thinking, at a remove from it. Follow the sound through time with your awareness remaining removed, detached, and centered.
- While attending to the sound, become aware of the auditory space surrounding you, the matrix of background silence that enables you to hear the sound, distinct from the ground. Your attention should be split roughly 50/50 between the sound and the auditory silence space surrounding you. This should be a soft, radial attention, not a hard, focused attention. This is the essence of the practice of “Listening with the Being.”
- Using your breath as a guide, extend and retract your awareness, like respiration, into that continuum of space that eventually connects you with the sound. Where does the silence end in this continuum, and where does the sound begin? Explore the interface of the two with your awareness. If you are able to, connect your awareness with the sound and feel it as a part of the extended being you’ve generated by this practice. If not, there is great benefit in simply becoming simultaneously aware of the silence space around you and the sound.
- Abide in the state for as long as one desires.
This is a delightful practice. It is excellent for helping the individual discover that we all inhere in fields, fields that connect us with the world around us, and these fields have just as much reality in consciousness as the forms we tend to fixate on in more mundane states. Truly, the world is not ultimately balkanized. This practice is very effective in not only aiding that discovery, but in beginning to expand a person’s sense of self and deepen absorption in the being. Listening meditation tends to calm one very quickly, and as an added advantage, the randomness of the sounds selected, the slight variations through time, allow one to stay in the meditative state far longer than focusing on a static object does. The active mind tends to stay in a relaxed and passive state much more easily and for longer durations with a little bit of variation in sensory stimulation, or at least I’ve found this to be true for myself.
This practice, above all others, was the practice I most often and readily fell into after my opening experience. It performed itself, without any prodding of the personal will, at regular intervals when I spontaneously found myself in states of mindfulness. It remains my personal favorite. May you have similar success and also come to regard it highly in your personal practice.
Sample for your practice: Distant Trains Echoing in the Rain
Via Perennis 