Welcome to this meditation,
Mindfulness of sound.
To begin this meditation,
Allow your body to settle into the posture that you have chosen for the duration of this meditation.
If you're sitting on the floor,
Really feel the tailbone and the lower body root down into the ground.
And if you're sitting on a chair,
Feel the soles of the feet flat on the floor,
Rooting down into the ground.
This allows us to establish a grounded posture,
One of stability and one of integrity as we choose to practice.
Let's start this meditation with three deep breaths.
Inhaling fully,
Expanding the lungs,
And exhaling out all the way to the end of the exhale.
Breathing in deeply,
Feeling and expanding the lungs with fresh air before exhaling all the way to the end of the exhale.
The final deep breath in,
And a long exhale.
And then let your breathing revert back to its natural rhythm,
Its natural pace,
And just allow the body to breathe naturally.
In other words,
Let the body breathe the body.
Listen the body's ability to breathe.
With every breath in and every breath out,
Feel yourself settle deeper and deeper into the center of your body.
Allow yourself to drop in to this present moment,
To really feel the breath touching the core of your center.
You can visualize the breath going in and out of the stomach as if you were breathing in through the navel and out through the navel.
And as we do so,
The belly rises and the belly falls.
Belly rises,
Belly falls.
Rising and falling with every breath.
And now that we've made a connection to the breathing body,
Allow the breath or the concentration,
The attention that you have on the breath to move into the background,
And bring to the foreground the attention on sounds.
So wherever you're seated,
And whatever is occurring in your external environment,
Take in those sounds through the ears and bring your attention fully to just receiving those sounds.
It might be the sound of my voice.
It might be sounds in your own environment,
Both internally or externally.
It doesn't matter what the sounds are.
It's just about bringing our attention to them fully.
All the while the breathing continues in the background.
We keep trusting in our body's ability to breathe itself.
One way that we can practice by receiving sounds is to imagine that our ears are like microphones and these microphones receive all sounds without judgment.
So whatever sounds you receive through your ears,
Listen to it with beginner's mind.
In other words,
Listen to the sounds like you've never ever heard them before in your life.
Understand the sounds as if they are completely fresh.
And what is the texture of the sounds that you can hear?
And where do those sounds actually meet the ears?
And at what point do the ears turn the sounds into sound?
We can investigate this with curiosity and kindness in our practice.
You might notice that as you.
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Listen to the surrounding sounds of the room,
That your mind begins to wander into one of two places.
It might wander off into the future,
Making plans or to-do lists.
Or it might wander off into the past,
Ruminating on a storyline.
In either case,
If your mind wanders away,
Just gently guide it like a parent would guide a child.
Gently guide it back to the anchor point of sound.
And with fresh,
Open ears,
Begin listening again with curiosity and kindness.
All the while,
Still trusting in the body's ability to breathe,
Still feeling that inhale and that exhale in the background,
And keeping the practice of listening to sounds in the foreground.
We'll focus more on the Western sound and interesting sounds of listen to the sounds Listening to sounds is a great way to bring ourselves back into this present moment,
Because sounds only exist in the present moment.
By listening deeply,
We can begin to hear the subtle whispering of the universe as it talks to us in a myriad of ways.
Listen closely.
Listen to sounds like a deer listens to sounds in the forest,
With open alertness,
Presence,
And stillness.
Listen to sounds as if your life depends on it,
Because in many ways,
It does.
And begin to deepen your inhale and your exhale to finish this meditation.
Come back to the feeling sensations of the body,
And when you're ready,
Open your eyes.
Thank you for your practice.
