8. Meditation 4

Focus on the sounds around you and let them be objects of awareness.

Take a seat however you’re comfortable.
It usually helps to keep your spine erect and then become aware of the sensation of breathing.
You might intentionally take a few deep breaths but then let your breath come and go naturally.
As you pay attention to the breath, feel your body resting in space.
And as you feel the breath come and go and notice any other sensations that appear in your body.
Become aware of any sounds that you hear around you.
Whether it’s the sound of my voice, or the sound of birds, or traffic, or even other people talking.
Just notice each sound the moment it appears in consciousness.
And notice too how you don’t make any of these sounds appear.
Nor can you keep them out of consciousness.
Nor can you hold onto them for a moment longer than they stay on their own.
You can only hear them when and as they arise.
As each sound arises and captures your attention for a moment,
only to fall away in the next, let it announce this space of conscious awareness.
As a matter of direct experience, you are simply the space in which these sounds and feelings in
your body are appearing. All of these phenomena are appearing in the same space of consciousness.
And the moment you discover your lost and thought, notice the thought itself appearing in the same space.
What happens to a thought the moment you observe it?
Does it disappear like a sound?
Can you hold on to a thought for a moment longer than it appears?
Can you hold on to the sound of my voice?
Can you hold on to a thought for a moment longer than it appears?
For the last minute of this session, come back to the feeling of the breath wherever you’ve been following it, and just focus there.
See if you can cover it completely with your awareness.
Well, now that we’ve introduced it, you’ll discover that there’s no such thing as a distracting environment in which to meditate.
You certainly don’t need silence.
You can be right next to a construction site, and you’ll find that these sounds that impinge upon consciousness are just as good as anything else as objects of mindfulness, and for some of you they might be better than anything else.
There’s something about sound that articulates the openness and ungovernability of experience, even more clearly than sensations in the body do.
And as we add components to this practice, you’ll find that any experience is a potential object of meditation, because the practice is simply to see and hear and feel more clearly, whatever’s appearing in each moment.