Searching for the self in sounds and body sensations

Beginning by really withdrawing any sense of pressure, effort, things that need to be achieved to the extent that you’re able to, maybe deep habits of trying hard to do things that are not easy to let go in the moment, you can just withdraw all of the energy as much as possible from these habits. And the pressure and effort and trying normally manifests in physical tension in the head, the face particularly. It’s the face and the head that think they’re in charge of the meditation and they have to get it done. They can encourage softness there. You might also notice if there’s just a kind of tightness in the posture, can sometimes be that the body is sort of maybe slightly leaning forward or just held a little bit. We want the body to be awake and sort of upright enough to have a sense of a kind of bright presence. But we really want it to be relaxed and easy and just checking in with your body, finding the ground, finding your breath, feeling your skin and the things it’s in contact with, noticing if your body feels like a pleasant place to be this morning, that’s discomfort or whether it’s a little bit vague, even the sense of your body just welcoming whichever one of those is true, welcoming your body just as it is. So just deepening into your connection with your immediate embodied experience. Feeling the temperatures in your body, the patterns of tension, the spacious parts that feel nice or okay or relaxed. Maybe spending a moment or two just receiving the breath. Just checking in with your emotional state this morning. What’s the mood? Notice if it feels like your emotional state is a helpful one for meditation or an unhelpful one, and just abandoning any sense that there can be an unhelpful emotional state for this process of tuning to experience with sensitivity, curiosity, and kindness. So just welcoming whatever the mood is, whatever the emotional state, noticing how this shows up in your body. And then we’ll begin to tune into sounds. So just opening your awareness to receive the comings and goings of sounds. There may be plenty of sounds in your environment, there may be fewer, may need to listen carefully for subtle noises coming from your house, your body, from outside. Then you don’t need to leave your body to do this. You don’t need to go anywhere to hear sounds. Sounds come to you. So notice if there’s a sense of sort of reaching out to look for sounds and just rest back in your body and just allow sounds their space in your consciousness. And we want to be really clear that sounds are arising without any action on your part, without any effort. In fact, sounds are known without any effort as well. They’re met and received just by being here. So really notice and let yourself absorb this fact about sounds. You don’t need to go looking for them. You are not making them happen. They just enter your consciousness, shift, change, and then they leave it. And we might also notice that when sounds arise, as sounds arise, they’re met with a sense of being either pleasant or unpleasant or neutral. Each sound individually is sort of categorised in this way. Probably most sounds are neutral. They’re sort of filed as neutral and then no further action is taken. Some sounds may be unpleasant, they may arise and be categorised in this way. And then there may be a subtle reaction against the sound. A kind of “no.” You may feel this in your body, a subtle, “No, not this sound. Don’t like this one.” Pleasant sounds may arise and be categorised in this way. And then there might be a sense of, “Yes, yes, please.” So we want to notice this process. Firstly, being very clear, sounds are autonomous. They do their own thing. I’m not making them happen. Secondly, they’re kind of sorted into these three baskets. And with this categorization, there’s a kind of response to that. Sounds that we like, we sort of welcome or pay more attention to. Sounds that we don’t like, we sort of subtly tense up against them as if we’re trying not to hear them even though we’ve already heard them. Neutral sounds kind of slide by without much notice. And then I’m going to ask you to try and notice something quite subtle now. Might be a little bit difficult to grasp, but we can try. As sounds arise, there’s the sound and there’s this labelling process. And we can also filter out the sense, the sense of hearing, the sense of knowing the sound. So it’s like we’re dividing the kind of sound as a sense impression, something so-called external, with the hearing and knowing or meeting of the sound. They’re like two ends of the same thing. We can just sort of shift from one to the other. There’s the sound conceived of as being sort of out there and the receiving of the sound conceived of as being in here. You can just lean one way and then the other, leaning out to the external sound, leaning in to the sense of being aware of the sound. And with this sense of knowing the sound, sense of being aware of the sound, there’s some assumption or some sense in some way of the one who knows the sound, the one who hears the sound, the self that receives the sound, a kind of identification with the hearing process. This is subtle and it can be very slippery because it’s something that’s sort of felt to be there. And then when we look more closely, it kind of evades attention. It’s like, “Yeah, there’s the me that hears the sounds. I feel that to be there in some way.” And then when I look for that, by tracing back this sort of chain in consciousness—sound as sense impression, sense of hearing or being aware of the sound, the sense of the one that is aware, that is hearing—I trace it back. I can’t find something that really fulfills that role. There’s not really. There’s not really an “I” to be found there, but I’m jumping to conclusions, so investigate yourself and see. And as always, when we practise like this, allowing any confusion, any blankness, any sense of, “I don’t understand, I don’t know,” not trying to get an answer, not trying to figure things out, but trying to undermine some kind of assumptions baked into the way that we experience things. So just for the last 30 seconds of this part of the practice where we’re tuning to sounds again, see how much you can trace back this chain: sound arises, it’s kind of met, it’s heard, and it’s categorised into pleasant, neutral, or unpleasant. And there’s a feeling like there’s some self that’s hearing and categorising it. We’re going to move now to the body, so we’re going to tune to the body with exactly the same kind of attitude, the same sensitivity and curiosity, and just spend a moment maybe scanning through your body, sensing your toes, the little sensations there, sensing your legs, tension and relaxation, and feeling of the skin there. Sensing up through the whole body, just sort of bringing different regions online into awareness and then just resting back into this whole-body awareness where you can just receive it all. And we want to notice that just like sounds—sounds just come and go without us doing anything—our sensations that make up our body are exactly the same. They’re just arising in consciousness. You’re not doing your body. You’re not making your body happen. Just like with sounds, there’s a kind of soundscape that is changing moment to moment. In just the same way, there’s a kind of “body-scape,” the landscape of the body. This collection of sensation just arises in each moment out of nowhere, just like sounds do. This can even be surprising because our sense of the body is this enduring object and that’s the objective sense of the body. The subjective body is not an enduring object. It’s an ever-changing galaxy of sensation that arises fresh in each moment, out of nowhere. And the apparently solid anatomy of the body is actually a sort of overlay that gets laid on top of this galaxy of sensation. The mind sorts it into arms and legs and belly and head, sorts it into pleasure and pain and neutral sensations. So again, we can watch this same process in the body. Body sensations arise, internal sensations and external sensations. The breath, the skin's contact with the outside world, the tingles, the sense of presence or space in the body, all this just arises in consciousness and then it's met with this sense of pleasant, unpleasant, neutral. So we can familiarise ourselves with this categorisation. The tension in my head is felt to be unpleasant and then there's a subtle kind of. No, a subtle pushing away. I don't want to feel that. The breath in my belly might be felt to be mildly pleasant and that's met with a more welcoming attitude. The tingles in my toes and fingers and the sense of space in my upper arms or my thighs, these might be felt to be neutral and as such they're not even noticed unless we bring sensitive attention in this way. What's neutral or very mild is largely subconscious. Most of the time it doesn't create enough drama to bubble up to consciousness or to the sort of executive consciousness, we should say. So body sensations arise and they're categorised in this way. And again, maybe we can get the sense of the sense of feeling itself and the sense of the one feeling the body, the one that receives these sensations. Or rather we can notice that there's an assumption that there's someone that's feeling these sensations. Not saying it's a false or a true assumption, but it's sort of assumed in some way. We can just gently probe this. I feel myself as the one who knows this body, the one who receives this body. What is this experience of me? Where is it located when my body is known to be just a moment to moment arising of sensation? Does that mean the me is somehow one of these sensations? Or is it all of these sensations? Is it the container in which all the sensations happen? Or is it some completely different relationship? You can just try all of these out. Again, we're not trying to find an answer, trying to expose the lack of immediate experiential justification for the sense of me. So we've just got a minute or so together like this before we end, maybe just noticing any sense of kind of loosening up of the hard edges of our internal experience. Maybe there's more sense of mystery, of freedom, of space, less sense of solidity to things.