The Joy of Blogging On "Life Lived More Deeply"

The LLMD website (www.home.earthlink.net/~llmd/) is, by its nature, relatively more static than a blog – and so suffers more from how genuinely difficult it is to put all this into words. (Even while we will continually edit and even reorganize the site to do a better job of this.) In this blog, I – and you, if you choose to comment – can more free-associate about this somewhat nebulous concept and experience. We can come at it from many different angles and lay no trips on ourselves that what we write has to conceptually make sense. Lots of material on the web site may also not make a lot of logical sense, but I aspire to reasonability there more than I intend to here.

So you may also want to not hold on to the requirement that these words need to fit into a nice neat package. In fact, sometime you may want to deconstruct the words – not attempt to decode them – as in the sound meditation described below.

Sound Meditation

Sometimes, especially when I am either doing monotonous work that doesn’t require a lot of attention – or walking down the street or just sitting somewhere, I will just let all the sounds in my environment wash over me. Sometimes it will be obvious what caused the sound, other times not. As much as possible, I let go of naming them. If the sounds include human voices, I will let go of listening to words or meaning, but just allow the sounds to have their own auditory qualities. When I’m doing this, I also am sometimes able to not attach value judgments to the sounds, e.g. “car sounds” – noise, bad; or “bird sounds” – pretty, good. No preferences, all just sounds. (As with any meditation or awareness practice, my attention naturally wanders from this focus on the sounds in my environment. The practice then is to not judge this wandering, but to just lightly bring the attention back to the sounds.)

This kind of sound meditation will be a little trickier to do with the written words on this blog. I’ll explore the possibility of putting sound clips on here, but may not be able to do this. If you want, though, it could be an interesting experiment to tape record a passage and then listen to it in the floating, non-meaningful way described above. The effect will certainly be different listening to your own voice. Otherwise, you can read out loud or hear the sounds of the words in your mind, or simply pay less attention to the voice in your mind that continually wants to know “what does it mean”.