Impermanence - sounds and body

So today we’re going to practise with impermanence, Theme of impermanence. And, yeah, it’s something that the Buddha talked about basically all the time. Often we think of it in terms of, yeah, you know, life’s impermanent, phases of life are impermanent. Everything that’s happening to us is going to change, it’s going to end, it’s going to shift. And that’s a useful way to think about it. In our meditation practise, we can actually be really clear in a very direct moment-to-moment way just how everything that makes up our experience is arising, changing, and falling away constantly. Nothing is really solid and enduring. Even things that we sort of think are solid and enduring. Even the sense of what it feels like to be me, actually, moment to moment is different, it’s changing. So we’ll explore that in this practise. As always, to begin, we need to just find out where we are, just check in with ourselves and make space for whatever’s here this morning or this evening. So just landing into your seat, feeling the sense of the ground underneath you, the whole planet underneath you, and just witnessing your experience of being here in this body, with this heart, this mind. This morning, you can tune into your body, just notice what sensations are calling for your attention. It can be helpful to do a little mini sweep of the body, from the feet to the head to the fingertips, being curious about which regions of the body feel like they have more going on and just setting your strong intention to really allow everything to be exactly as it is. Much of what we do in meditation practise is aimed at cultivating this attitude, this capacity to just leave things as they are, leave our experience to its own devices, just meet it well. So we can just bring this attitude to the shifting sensations of the body. Then just spending a moment tuning into your emotional atmosphere, your mood, doing so in a really spacious way, giving it room to breathe. That might be an easy word. You might say you feel restless or calm, sad, joyful, angry, or it may be much more subtle than that; it may just be something you can’t put a word to. But you can still know in your direct experience what this subtle emotional flavouring of things is. Again, just allowing, welcoming, giving space to whatever you find. There’s no right mood to begin meditation in. There’s no mood that you need to get to. We’re going to open out our awareness to notice sounds. There may be many sounds in your environment right now, there may not be so many. You may need a very delicate ear to pick out sounds. But just open to receiving whatever sounds are present. Try and do so in a way where you’re not so much zooming into this sound and then that sound. You’re not going into the sound to meet it, but you’re actually sort of resting back and taking in the whole soundscape, letting the sounds come to you. There’ll be sounds from outside your house, maybe sounds from inside your house. Sounds from your body. Just welcome them all. And notice that these sounds don’t require any effort from you to arise in your consciousness. They just sort of appear. They have autonomy. Whether we want to hear them or not doesn’t really matter; they just come and go. So keep listening in this way and keep noticing this independence of sounds. They’re not dependent on you. You don’t make them happen. Then tune in, particularly to the beginnings and the endings of sounds. Really noticing when a sound arises out of the silence. And when it falls away again, dissolving back from where it came from. You can tune in too to the quality of change. Just noticing the constant change within individual sounds, but also, more importantly, within this whole soundscape, the whole field of sounds. Rather than needing to divide the soundscape up into this sound and that sound, giving them labels like bird, car, radiator, just let the whole soundscape shift and dance and change. Noticing that the tendency to categorise and label sounds is something that comes after the raw soundscape. As you watch sounds in this way, as you watch them playing, dancing, shifting, maybe you can also get a sense of the kind of silence that underlies all sounds. You might be able to get the sense that sounds emerge from this vast silence. They have their trajectory, they do their thing, then they dissolve back into this silence. If we can get any sense of this, we can really use this sense of silence to kind of contrast the impermanence, constant change in the soundscape. It becomes starker, more obvious. And this silence is not so much an absence of sound. It’s more a kind of mysterious presence that births sounds and receives them when they’re finished. Spend another minute or two here with sounds, watching them emerge from the silence. Noticing that this soundscape is sort of fresh, every moment new, different. We draw circles around things with the mind saying this is this, this is that, but underneath that, and prior to that, just this constant soup of sensation of sound. Then we want to stay with this sense of everything just fizzing, popping, changing, coming, and going. We want to now include the body. Just expand your zone of interest, if you like, to include the very many sensations that are coming and going in the space of your body to begin with. Maybe we can name a few obvious ones to help us tune in, such as the breath doing its thing, rising and falling. Each breath is completely unique, even if at first glance we might assume that it’s roughly the same. Actually, the breath is such a rich and detailed collection of sensations, of tiny sensations. You might also notice in your body subtle muscle activation, the ways that your body needs to very subtly engage muscles to keep you in whatever position you’re in. This too is actually subtly changing moment to moment. There’s the sense of everything that the skin’s in contact with—the clothes and the air. These sensations too, if we pay close attention, are not static. Even the movement of the breath creates some movement pretty much all over the body. The skin is rising and falling, and its contact with the clothes is changing. You might notice in different parts of the body very subtle sensations, like tingles in the fingers and the toes—things that just feel like the subtle movement of energy, nerves talking to each other. If you just pay attention to one small region of the body, like one finger, you can notice that these really subtle sensations are constantly flickering, shifting, buzzing. So let’s really open out awareness to take in the whole body, this whole symphony of sensation. Just like we did with the sounds, we can be really clear that we’re not doing this. I’m not doing these sensations; I’m not creating them. It’s easier to see with sounds because we’re less identified with them. But just as sounds come and go of their own accord, so too do my body and my sensations that make up my immediate experience of my body, given to me. Sometimes we have a subtle habit of slightly blaming ourselves for certain physical sensations. So just notice this is not me doing this, and really tune into this quality of change. Just like we were noticing this whole soundscape changing moment to moment, we can notice the whole bodyscape changing. Again, rather than labelling sensations, creating an artificial kind of box that endures through time—for the breath, for this area of discomfort, this area of tension, the sensations of contact with what you’re sitting on—we artificially extend these into time, back into the past, forward into the future, creating a sense of solidity. See if you can just not do that and meet your whole bodyscape fresh in every moment, this mysterious, formless, cloudlike moment to moment, arising habitually. If we were asked, “What’s your body?” we’d kind of point to something solid, a leg, say, “This, this is my body.” But actually, in your direct experience, your subjective body—the only body that you really know directly—is not shaped like arms and legs, torso. It’s this raw, cloud-like, mysterious galaxy of experience. Superimposed onto this, the mind partitions off different parts, gives them labels, and identifies different sensations. It decides whether they’re pleasant or unpleasant, and then reacts to them in different ways, creating stories about them. Trying to get underneath all of that is not necessarily an easy task by any means, but the way that we can really get underneath all of that is to be really present for this change, this moment-to-moment change. Just as we were noticing the silence that underlies sounds, we can notice the kind of presence that underlies the body, the kind of space, the field of awareness itself. Whichever of these descriptions helps you to get a glimpse of what I’m talking about, the background to this fizzing, popping, shifting landscape of the body, we can tune into this very quiet and very vast space. We’ll rest here for the next couple of minutes, using the final minutes of the practise to take in this ever-changing mystery of existence. As we begin to make our way out of the practise, it can be interesting as you maybe bring some gentle movement into your body to see if you can include this in this sense of the body as this whole shifting field. Maybe you can notice that even your intention to move and the sense of control—the sense of me being the one doing the movement—this too is a kind of experience that shows up in this field.