Come To Your Senses: Hearing

This is the 5th and final session on Come to Your Senses for brain injury care. This series helps us practice attentional awareness using pleasant or at least neutral anchors of attention. Here we sink into sound via the sense of hearing. Let the sweetness of sound land on your ears and in your heart.

Transcript

Hi there,

Jesse here.

Welcome to the fifth and final in this series on coming to your senses.

Today we're going to be focusing on the sense of sound.

And I welcome you all here,

No matter where you're from.

Maybe you're from Edmonton or El Paso or Antinaga or Edinburgh.

My pattern,

If I can remember,

Is to start with Canada so you can start to learn the geography of my nation.

And then to do two world cities and then also to end where I can on an American city.

Knowing that certainly a lot of people here will be English speaking and from Canada and the US.

So that's my logic there.

So the sense of sight,

Oh my,

Sorry,

Sound.

See me being aversive to even the idea of sound.

I am doing it last for a reason.

Certainly with my brain injury,

Sound has been one of the more challenging senses.

Of course,

Being sensitive to sound is a common symptom.

And you'll notice that I'm using the word sound rather than noise.

I realized at some point along the way that by using the term noise,

I was just adding a judgment on to sound.

Because really what we call noise is just sound.

And so that is one of the things that I practice with.

It's just allowing things that land on my ear to be sound,

Not noise.

And I noticed that I took an amazing course last year,

I guess it was actually in 2020,

Called A Wake in the Wild with Mark Coleman,

All about nature meditation.

It was a six week course online every day.

Amazing.

But he focused quite a bit on sky,

On sounds and in nature and in particular bird sounds.

And living here in Vancouver,

We have a lot of crows,

Which are beautiful when they're flying overhead and not as fun when they're going.

Anyway,

In that I realized that I sometimes turn away from sound and hadn't really invited it in as much to my practice.

But actually,

It's a lovely way to be mindfully with pleasant sounds,

Allowing us to enjoy them more.

And also working with difficult sounds and practicing,

Letting go of our aversion to the letting them just be sound and noticing any tension that comes in the body with them and doing our best to let that go.

It doesn't help when we clench up against things.

So that's a really big part of Mindful Piss and Concussion Care is noticing when we're reactive to things and choosing to let go of that reactivity and respond wisely.

But today we're going to continue on with our practicing our attentional control.

And we've done this with the other four senses,

Choosing pleasant anchors of attention.

And that's really the starting point in the mindful concussion approach that I teach.

It's really to learn the basic skill of mindfulness of bringing our attention purposefully to an anchor in the present moment,

Getting lost in thought,

Which is normal,

And bringing it back.

And to me,

It's so important that for brain injury survivors that we start with pleasant or relatively pleasant anchors of attention because so much of traditional practice just invites us to be with whatever is arising,

Which with the brain injury is sometimes pain,

Sometimes panic,

Sometimes just virulently uncomfortable physical sensations,

Emotions,

And thoughts.

So in this way,

You may have noticed if you've listened to the other videos or tracks that starting with pleasant anchors can be a much more wise path for learning,

Learning this attentional control.

So I'd like to invite you to think about where you need to be to practice with sound.

And I'm going to lead you in guidance,

But then I will be quiet so that you can listen to the sounds around you,

Which means that you might want to not do this practice with earbuds so that you can better hear the sounds around you and get yourself in a situation where there is a little bit more sound happening.

Whether you maybe put on a little bit of music or go outside where or go to some location where there's more ambient sounds of humans or animals or nature sounds.

By the ocean would be lovely.

Crash,

Crash of the waves,

Not always available.

So it doesn't necessarily have to be a really pleasant sound,

But just one that you know isn't really triggering for you because we want to do this practice with sounds that are pleasant or at the very least neutral.

Okay,

I'm going to assume that you've found a nice soundscape and as always can you feel yourself if you've been following me so far,

Almost like a muscle memory of,

Oh I'm beginning to practice,

I'm going to let go.

I'm going to let go of any tension,

Even just 5% that may be found in the body doing kind of that quick body scan of unquenching,

Releasing in the mind and the muscles.

And when we do listening and sound meditation,

We're not grasping for sound,

We're allowing sounds to land in our ear and in our bodies and nervous systems and just letting them be there.

So I'm going to be quiet in a moment and invite you to let whatever sounds arise,

Even if there's not a lot of sound,

Even if there's big gaps between it,

To arise and land and just allow your ears to perk up and really shine that flashlight of awareness so that your whole being is focused gently,

Softly on what sounds arise and pass.

You may notice that it might not be that much sound around you,

There may be big gaps between and that's fine.

You may also notice internal sounds,

Even just sound of yourself swallowing.

And as you tune into sounds,

It's possible that you may notice some constriction against it,

That kind of aversion to sound,

If it can at times feel overwhelming.

Seeing if you can just let go of that fear of sound.

Oftentimes the fear that arises when we get overwhelmed by sensations with the brain injury is that we feel like we won't be able to handle it,

Or if we attend to it,

It'll just get worse and worse.

But so often it's when we let go of that fear and allow ourselves to be with what's here now,

We realize,

Oh,

This might be a bit jingling to my nervous system,

But I can handle it.

It's not going to do me in.

And if instead you notice that the sounds are really pleasant on the ear and on the nervous system,

Seeing if you can allow yourself to really sink into that and savor it.

A big part of my personal practice is savoring whatever sweetness arises.

And there could be some sourness in the background too,

But just allowing the sweetness to land in your heart.

Come back,

Come back from wherever you are.

If you've gotten lost in thought,

A whole point of practice is to gently bring our attention back to our anchor,

Gently but firmly,

Like we might call a puppy who's,

You know,

Wandered off or grabbed the hand of a toddler who's walked off the path.

And then the next few moments when you're ready,

Letting go of this practice,

Knowing that coming into presence with the sense of sound is available so easily throughout the day.

If you hear a pleasant sound,

Sink into it,

Only be there for it.

Here's a song you like in the store,

Stop and listen.

And if there's unpleasant sounds,

Which can be common for us,

See if you can again turn away from this labeling of it as noise and just maybe put your hand on your heart and say it's okay.

It's okay.

It's just,

Just the sound.

What can you say for some sweet sounds today?