Have you ever sat perfectly still and just listened to silence? No sounds or different notes streaming into your ear canal. There's absolutely no waves being emitted into your ears from your faithful MP3 player nor are they are tunes being sent your way from the friendly neighbourhood radio jockey. Have you ever expereinced that in all its entirety? Try it once, if you haven't already.
It's a pretty profound experience if you've tried it in its truest form. You could consider it a form of meditation but it's much more than that. It still is an activity that involves listening. But the listening experience is very different from the usual cacophony that assaults your ears everyday. Meditating also implies shutting your eyes, finding a quiet spot somewhere and just delving deep into some kind of meditative state of mind where your focus is to calm yourself or just be.
Listening to nothing at all can be both, liberating and a slightly frightening experience. You feel humbled and proud at the same. Humbled because you feel like a small speck in the universe, and since you don't hear anything, you don't react and you really have no input into any action or consequence that may be. You feel proud because you appreciate all the sounds you hear everyday. I could never imagine a life where I am unable to appreciate all the beautiful music that's playing in the world at any given point in time. Something as inane as the rattling of train cars as they speed past on iron rails takes on a whole new dimension once you've heard nothing. It's fascinating and you hear some kind of music. Definitely not a hallucination, in case you're wondering!
In any case, going back to the very concept of listening to silence, it's an interesting process if you haven't done it before. Even when I've practised Yoga or go for a walk, I'm always accompanied by my trusty iPod. Or just plain music in the background. Music seemed to define the space I'm in and set the tone for that moment. Without it, with silence, the possibilities are endless. You come to appreciate the openness and unlimited possibilities of silence. It allows you to tune into your own thought process. In a funny way, it reminds me of all those times I'd "zone out" in class and didn't really hear the teacher or someone talking to me, even though I was physically present in that moment. Told that I was "daydreaming," I'd be offended because I've never been a daydreamer but I guess, I just wasn't listening to sound. In my own head, I'd manage to tune out sounds I didn't want to hear and heard absolutely nothing. So I guess, the skill to appreciate silence and hear nothing was always present, just not a skill I practised often. That's going to change pretty soon, huh?
It's nice to be disconnected and disentagle yourself from the regular going-ons in your life. Just listening to nothing at all worked for me... Give it a shot, it's surprisingly nice!
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