Sound Meditation

Whereas vision, the lead sense for most of us, seems especially set up for perceiving separation (“This is not that”, “These two things are disconnected from each other”), sound is much more available to be perceived as waves washing over us. It is much more feasible to not separate this sound from that sound, to let it all join together as one unbroken tapestry of sound.

This is obviously not automatic. Our mind still likes to identify, categorize and name the sounds we hear. It's fairly difficult to absolutely tune out this part of our brain that wants to identify and even make value judgments about the sounds we hear. I love doing this exercise as I am walking around town, but I do notice this identifying and judging process in my brain: bird sounds – good, car sounds – bad, expressway sounds – very bad.

But it is pretty doable to at least partly to unhook from this conceptual process, to go back to the raw data – especially if we choose to do this and invest just the slightest bit of mental discipline around it.

Today is a windy, raw, early March day. When I let go of my griping about the weather, especially the wind, that very wind stirs up some very cool sounds (still identified by me, but after at least a brief moment of just hearing): leaf skittering across the sidewalk, stop sign rattling, wind blowing across my ears. A couple of the coolest sounds sat unjudged – even unidentified - only for a moment: paper bag crinkling under a car tire, plastic cup making its noisy way down the street. After that delicious moment of just hearing, the judgment “litter – bad” asserted itself. But, because I was so much grokking sounds during that walk, it was really not that hard to let go of the mentalizing and drop back into the gloriously diverse sounds.

Just a few minutes earlier, I was really having a ball surrendering to the sounds in a coffee shop where I was sitting with some friends. There were two separate conversations burbling along among my friends – one at 2 o’clock and one at about 11. One way I love to release myself from the conceptual part of my brain and thirstily drink in the sounds around me is to let go of decoding the words and conversations I hear. It is easier to do this when I don’t know the conversers – somehow, some part of me feels it is “supposed to” be a “good listener” when friends are talking, but in the coffee shop just now there were so many other threads or eruptions of sound that it was really not too hard to stop “listening to” my friends’ conversations and simply hear them.

Some of the other sounds I did identify and partly decode, but not completely: other conversations in the room, a musical soundtrack (more seducing me to “understand” because there were lyrics, not just sound). But the juiciest sounds were all the little rattles, bangs, thumps and tinkles coming from behind the counter. They were so much fun partly because I literally did not “know” what they were. I could speculate about their origins, if I chose (and sometimes I did): refrigerator door closing, lattes being whipped by that little wand they stick in them, etc. But, combined with all the other sounds in the room, it was relatively easy to just let them rise and then fall away, just as the sounds they were – no identity.

I had really a lot of luck just letting my hearing swim around the room – words at 11 o’clock, music, bop at three o’clock (behind the counter), words at 2 o’clock, words also at 2 o’clock but somewhere further back in the room (sometimes I couldn’t stop myself from looking to see what table I thought they were coming from, but that less disrupted the ocean of sound than actually being able to make out the words - and sometimes I also let the origin fall away into irrelevance).

I think my friends may have thought I was stoned (especially since they were, for some synchronistic reason, talking about marijuana – which I have laid off for a lot of years, but, surprisingly, most of them in this conversation, which – yes – I was at least intermittently decoding, apparently still actively partake of). So I was behaving somewhat oddly (another judgment), sitting outside the conversation and looking a little maybe aloof, maybe spaced out, maybe just disengaged. At one point, one friend – directly across from me, so he maybe saw my unusually floating presence – said, “You’ve got to stop interrupting so much, Majo.” I didn’t have much trouble coming back with, “I can’t help it, I’m just a buttinsky”, then dropping out again to the symphony of lush coffee shop sounds.

Here at work now in my little gift shop in a big downtown hotel, I’ve gotten caught up in a couple of (really pretty fun) conversations, which have pulled me back to the world of meaning, as opposed to simple audition. (These sounds are all auditioning and none of them have been voted out yet.) But I think the conversations have been so much fun partly because I have brought an easy, free presence to them – and I’m showing up this way just because of my somewhat extended, luxurious sound bath.

Now the other conversers have departed. I’m in my little conceptual bubble of writing. But I’m almost finished with this little piece. Once I have let go of the headlong momentum of this writing, maybe I’ll just drop back into the sounds around me. Maybe. I’ve got a little list going of other pieces pushing through to be written today by me – a big turn-on for the writer in me – but maybe I’ll just let some sounds visit me first.

We’ll see.