Relaxing into sound

I want to remind you today of using sound as a meditative support. Usually I teach this in Session 5 of the Foundations course but maybe some of you have forgotten it. I find it a skillful approach because it has a built in impermanence meditation and it also helps people to let go because the sound can't be controlled. Here's the way Rob Nairn describes the method in Tranquil Mind*:

Traditionally breath is used as the focus for meditation, but this is not the only way and many Westerners find other methods more beneficial.

If you live in a noisy place, or find that your mind is tense or tight or obsessive, or particularly if you find you are trying to control what is happening inwardly or are too concerned with "getting it right", you will discover that a subtle sense of struggle or striving will begin to dominate your meditation. This will cause the mind to become tense and rigid instead of pliable and open. The tense, rigid, striving mind is not meditating. It is the open, relaxed mind which experiences meditation.

If you are experiencing these difficulties, try using sound as the focus for your meditation.

Sit... but instead of focusing on the breath, allow your attention to "relax into" sound. This means permit yourself to hear whatever sounds are coming to you and allow your attention to remain with sound. You will soon discover the difference between hearing and listening. The latter is a tight, focused action which fixes on a chosen sound and attempts to remain with that to the exclusion of all others. This causes tension. Hearing is more panoramic and does not involve choice. Whatever sounds come to you are fine and are choicelessly accepted as the focus for your mindfulness at any moment. The mind which is hearing will become relaxed and open, because there is no choice, preference or struggle - just an easy "being present".

Every time your mind wanders into distraction, see that this has occurred and return in a relaxed way to awareness of sound.

I really recommend this method - the method of simple hearing and accepting of whatever sounds fall on the ear. This is my meditative support of choice when I have no other particular reason to use something else. It is very spacious, very freeing.

*Copies of Tranquil Mind are available at the Center.