Mindfulness of Sounds and Thoughts Audio Transcript

And as we continue sitting here, let's experiment with letting go of the sense of the body as the primary locus of our attention and give ourselves over to another aspect of the present moment, namely hearing and recognizing that we are immersed in and bathed by a soundscape that is continually presenting itself to our ears courtesy of the air. And so right now, in this moment, letting the breath and a sense of the body move into the background of our attentional field and featuring instead hearing itself, giving our full attention to hearing whatever is here to be heard, sounds, and the spaces between them, silence itself, in the same way that we've been featuring the breath sensations or other sensations in the body and the sense of the body as a whole breathing. And so moment by moment, being in touch with hearing. Sounds near and sounds far. Allowing them to be just as they are and simply attending to them moment by moment by moment.

Noticing, of course, if we have any judgments or evaluations of the sounds we're hearing, whether some we find pleasing and others not, whether some we wish were louder and others absent altogether. Just letting whatever sounds are actually here be here as they are, sounds and the spaces between them, moment by moment, and bringing the mind back to hearing over and over again when it gets carried away. And now when you're ready, let's let go of hearing even though the sounds will still be coming to our ears as we now intentionally feature the stream of thinking itself, center stage in the field of our awareness.

This is not the same as inviting ourselves to think as many thoughts as possible or, for that matter, any at all, or even to search for thoughts, but rather to simply recognize them as thoughts when they do arise in the field of awareness with the same qualities of attention that we have been bringing to the breath and to the body as a whole into sounds. In fact, we can be in relationship to our thoughts in the very same way that we were just in relationship to sounds, treating them as discrete events in the field of awareness that arise and linger ever so briefly, and then pass away just as do sounds or waves on the sea.

Noticing their various features, their content, their emotional charge, whether they are pleasant, unpleasant, or neutral. And rather than getting pulled into the content and thus into the thought stream itself, where one thought just leads to another, which leads to another, ad infinitum, we simply sit by the bank of the thought stream, listening to its gurglings and bubblings as it flows along. And when we are pulled into the stream itself, which we inevitably will be from time to time, just noticing that that has happened whenever you become aware of it.

And hauling yourself out of the stream once again, reestablishing yourself on the bank where you can just attend to each thought as a thought, not as the truth, not as a fact, not as a seduction, but as one more feature and a very powerful one at that of the interior landscape of our lives. And so resting here in awareness of the thought stream, moment by moment by moment, perhaps seeing much more clearly than usual exactly what is unfolding, then nigh constant chatter and commentary in our own minds, seeing each thought vividly as it arises, lingers, dissolves, and then another thought arises, and perhaps detecting as well the spaces between thoughts, fleeting as they may be.

Those moments when no thought is arising and recognizing those as well. Just sitting here, attending to thoughts as events, as bubbles and eddies and tiny whirlpools in the stream of the mind that we don't have to take quite so personally, that can be seen and known in awareness without our being quite so caught up in them, and coming back over and over again to this attending when you do get lost in thought and finally recognize it and so are already back, already outside the thought stream, already attending once again.

And when you're ready, now letting go of attending to the thought stream and just letting yourself rest in awareness with no particular effort to fixate on any object of attention, in what is sometimes called choiceless awareness or pure awareness, that like the sky can hold anything and everything, any aspect of our experience unfolding, including our darkest and most persistent and aversive thoughts and deepest fears, and yet is not tainted or disturbed or harmed by any of it. An awareness that sees and knows it all just as it is, and in the seeing, in the knowing, is free from the pull of negativity and habit and provides a new place to reside, a new way to be, and to live that is trustworthy, authentic, and reconnects us to our intrinsic wholeness, wisdom, and happiness, fully embodied at home right here, right now, in our own skin, with things exactly as they are.