This is an AI-generated transcript from auto-generated subtitles for the video above. It likely contains inaccuracies, especially with speaker attribution if there are multiple speakers.

Guided Meditation: Mindfulness of Hearing

Warm greetings. The theme for this week is the sense doors, the direct, immediate, simple sense experience. Yesterday I talked about seeing. Today is hearing.

If we use the word listen, listening tends to be more of an active idea, something we intentionally do. Hearing doesn't have to be that way. Just now I heard the train whistle, but I wasn't listening for it. I wasn't thinking about it until it whistled. Some people find it very nice to do mindfulness of hearing because of a lot of this not controlling, not adjusting, not fixing anything. Sometimes with a focus on the breathing, there can be a lot of ideas about, "I'm the agent, I have to breathe just the right way," and "How am I supposed to breathe, and what am I supposed to pay attention to?" Whereas when mindfulness is of hearing, there's a kind of letting go of trying to control it, trying to fix the sounds, trying to have the right sounds. There's a receptivity, an idea just to receive the sounds.

Some people learn a kind of non-manipulative, non-entangled knowing, non-entangled mindfulness by learning to hear well. Not listen—hear. So I'll suggest today that we start with hearing meditation, hearing mindfulness, becoming sensitive to that door. As we become more sensitive to it, it's possible to notice how we get entangled in it, how we get reactive to it, or involved in it, or we grab onto the branches of sound.

I don't know if you hear the train whistle now, but one way of getting involved would be wandering off in thought and thinking, "We should really move IMC to a quieter place so that when we broadcast in the morning it can be quiet." Or I could think, "Wow, that's fantastic, here I was going to do hearing meditation and we already have wonderful train whistles going. Let's move IMC closer to the train tracks^[1]." That way, I'm entangled with it, I'm caught in it. Instead, just allow the sounds to come and go, and come and go as they wish.

So we'll do it for a little while, and then I'll direct the same kind of attention to breathing if you'd like, or you can continue with sounds if that's nice for you.

Making yourself comfortable in a nice, easy posture so you don't have to put a lot of attention into maintaining it. This is a little different than how we usually do this meditation. Sit in an easy, relaxed posture, and gently close your eyes. We will do the usual kind of relaxing to begin, in a way that will support hearing.

Gently take a few deeper breaths. Comfortably deeper, fuller breaths, and then as you exhale, a comfortable, fuller exhale. As you exhale, begin to relax the whole body. Then let your breathing return to normal. On the inhale, feel these different parts of the body that I'll direct you to, and then as you exhale, relax that part of the body.

Begin by relaxing the belly. Feeling the belly and relaxing it. Maybe as you relax the belly, there's a settling of the weight of your lower torso into what supports your body—chair, cushion, bed. Feel the chest. Exhaling, relaxing the chest. Relaxing the shoulders. Softening in the shoulders. Feeling the muscles of your face, and relaxing them as you exhale. Softening around the eyes, and then relaxing the thinking muscle. The energy, the tension that might be associated with thinking, let that soften and relax.

If there is any sense of pressure, contraction, or tightness associated with thinking, or associated with the brain area, feel it on the inhale, and soften it on the exhale. And then open your awareness to sounds. The sound of my voice. If where you are is very silent, maybe it's the sound of silence. If there's a ringing in your ears, just relax. On the exhale soften, on the inhale allow. Allow hearing, openly and spaciously.

If you find yourself trying to listen, relax the trying. Instead of trying, allow your ears to hear. And if nothing comes, no worry. Sooner or later there'll be a sound, and some of the sounds will be unexpected. When they're unexpected, they come without any effort on our part, in the way unexpected sounds appear effortlessly.

Maybe each time you exhale, letting go of your thoughts. Letting go of efforting to hear, allowing hearing. Perhaps hearing can arise in that place in the mind where there is some silence, some stillness.

And then, either continuing with hearing, letting that be your anchor to the present moment, content that each sound you hear is an experience here and now. Or, if you prefer, gently allow the experience of breathing to come into awareness. Much like hearing sounds, feel the body breathing. Maybe relaxing the trying to do so, or the effort to do so, in favor of allowing yourself to feel the experience of breathing.

Relaxing whatever effort you're making to think. Relaxing the thinking energy. Relaxing the trying in favor of being open and receptive. Allowing hearing, allowing breathing to appear in awareness.

And as we come to the end of the sitting, bring to mind, or imagine, or intuit what it's like to most fully hear without entanglement, to hear without reactivity. Most fully just allowing the sound to come and go. To be present for however long its presence, and to go when it goes. What would it be like for the mind to be so spacious, relaxed? There'd be no searching, no analyzing, no reacting, no fixing. The sound would just be allowed to be there.

And perhaps when there's no entanglement with what we hear, it's allowed to sound, for it to be registered deep within. A place within where there is greater understanding, greater love or kindness, care, a greater peace with how things are. A peace that is more enduring than the vagaries and changes of the world.

There is a Buddhist Bodhisattva^[2], kind of a sacred being, called Kuan Yin or Kannon^[3]. It is said that the name can mean "the one who hears the sounds of the world." And Avalokiteśvara^[4] is the embodiment of compassion. Hearing the suffering of the world, to learn to hear well, allows us to be custodians and caretakers of the suffering of the world without being entangled. To be entangled is just to add to more suffering in the world. To be unentangled places us in a better position to alleviate suffering in this suffering world.

May this practice that we do be for the welfare and happiness of this world. May we, living in the way that we're meant to live, live in a way that supports the welfare and happiness of others. May all beings be happy. May all beings be safe. May all beings be peaceful. May all beings be free.

Dharmette: Satipaṭṭhāna (54) Sense Doors: Ears

The teachings of the discourse on the establishing of awareness have come now to the exercise on mindfulness of the senses, sense doors, and sense experience. In the explicit teachings that I've heard over these years on this particular Satipaṭṭhāna^[5] discourse, my sense is the particular exercises that are maybe least emphasized are the last one of the mindfulness of the body—which is the corpse meditations—and this one, the six senses.

It's a little bit of a pity that it's not emphasized more, because being really grounded in our sense experience of hearing, seeing, touching, smelling, tasting, and the clear seeing or knowing of what happens in the mind is really at the heart of classic Vipassanā^[6] practice. We're learning to stay present in the simplicity of our sense experience because that's always in the present moment. As we do so, as we come closer and closer to being able to do that—it's a process we do progressively, closer and closer to just the simplicity of sense experience—at the same time it is more and more letting go of our entanglement. The way we're caught and reactive and spending our time thinking. There's less and less attachment as we're able to stay more and more just with the ongoing flow of the current, the river of sense experience as it occurs.

The little teaching from the Buddha that's repeated a lot by insight teachers is the instruction: "In the seen, just the seen. In the heard, just the heard. In the cognized, just the cognized." In the sense experience, just a sense experience. This is just the seen, just the heard. That simplicity can be quite liberating, quite delightful, to have put down our preoccupations and reactivity.

So today the topic is hearing. Maybe because much of these teachings were composed before the written word became popular, the name of direct disciples of the Buddha is Sāvaka^[7]. Sāvaka can be translated as "the ones who hear," the ones who heard the teachings of the Buddha directly. But I like to think it has a deeper meaning: the ones who hear deeply, that are attentive, as if they're hearing to everything. The Christian order of monks called the Benedictines, apparently their code of conduct, their rule book of discipline, begins with the word ausculta in Latin, meaning "hear" or "listen."

There's a lot to be learned from listening and hearing. Hearing in particular, if we can hear receptively, openly. I like this idea of the 360-degree panorama of sounds, and to settle back and allow the sounds to appear from wherever in that big circle that they occur. Sometimes I have the sense that my awareness is as big and as expansive as the distance from where the sound originates. That happens when my mind gets very relaxed and open, and there's very little sense of boundaries to the mind, or location for things in the mind. The sense of location tends to become expansive and open. It's a delightful feeling to feel the mind so receptive, relaxed, and open that it just takes in sounds in a very spacious way.

Well, short of that, as we become aware of hearing, we can become aware of how we get entangled in what we hear, the knots that get formed. There's a sound, there's the ear that hears (the eardrums, maybe), and then there's the knot, the fetter that gets formed between those two. This can happen when someone's speaking to us. Someone's saying something and we stop listening because we grabbed onto a branch of how we feel hurt, or we have some new fantasy, a new idea. We go off thinking about something that's triggered by them, but we're no longer really listening. So we've formed a knot around our thoughts.

Or maybe we don't like what we hear, and so there's tension somewhere in the body. Maybe we like what we hear and we want more of it, and so there starts a kind of plotting, planning how to get more and let it continue. There are all kinds of judgments that can arise. There are all kinds of preferences, there are biases. There can be ideas of self, that this sound is impinging on me, I'm a victim of all these sounds, I'm the one who hears it.

There's an analogy that's used that if you hold your hand flat, and then something comes and strikes it, the stronger the strike, the more it's going to hurt your hand. But if you keep your hand open and relaxed so that things can just go right through, then you're less likely to be hurt. Just let it go through. Or even better is you lower the hand, and then the sounds just go right through and they don't touch, they don't hit anything.

The equivalent of the hand in the mind is sometimes a very strong sense of self. A strong sense of "me," "my" experience, "I'm the victim of it, it's happening to me, why are they doing it to me?" And to be able to lower that concern, that tension, that preoccupation of "me, myself, and mine" is one of the great fruits of this mindfulness practice. As this "selfing" relaxes, then the sounds go right through. Or we start seeing what the sounds strike, where the knot exists, and it becomes a mindfulness bell^[8] for us to notice that knot, to notice our reactivity, our reaction, our entanglement with it.

If you hear anything, your ears are hearing, you are in the present moment. Sounds are one of those phenomena that only exist in the current, the flow of the present moment. To be aware of sounds and listening, to be open to it and receive it, is to stay present here and now. It can be a way that we begin to recognize the forces of the mind that take us out of the present moment, the branches we hold onto. And it's not so much that we have to then analyze what we're holding onto, as it is to let go, to come back to this receptive awareness of listening. To learn to do this around sounds, some people find this is the laboratory in which it's easiest to learn relaxed, receptive, unentangled awareness, mindfulness. Then learning it in hearing, and then to apply it to other things as well.

So for this next 24 hours, I'd encourage you to give particular attention to hearing. Maybe find some times through the day that you can sit someplace—in a park, or by an open window, or someplace—and just allow yourself to hear sounds. Kind of like you might be lying on your back on the grass and looking at the clouds floating by above, and it's very relaxed. Just kind of settle back and take some time to just hear sounds. If you like listening to music, you could try to choose some music that is pleasant, relaxing to listen to, that may be just a delight to listen to. Maybe even just listening with your eyes closed. Sometimes with the eyes closed, there's less entanglement and more ability to just receive what's happening.

And in the course of the day, you might also practice this: listening to someone speak. How simply can you hear? How fully can you be present in a hearing way, so you can hear and listen to what they say without the entanglement? So that as you listen to them, you hear from a deeper place in your heart, in your body, and your mind. That you hear the other person, you allow those words to come, and because there's no entanglement, it doesn't hit anything on the way in. Maybe it can resonate with some deeper connectivity, some deeper place that may be a place of love, and compassion, care, peace.

May hearing be a doorway for freedom. Thank you.