According to the World Health Organisation an estimated 360 million people across the world have disabling hearing loss. If you had to decide which two disabilities were the worst, would it be to lose vision or hearing? As we’re dominantly visual, most people say that not being able to see would be worse. What they forget is that losing your hearing cuts you off from the social world around you, which can be even more isolating than not being able to see.
We speak and listen to others every day. Our whole world is full of talk and conversation, from the radio and television to phone calls, conversations, and meetings. If all of a sudden, we lost the ability to produce sound or hear, our world as we know it would come to a sudden stop. Maybe because hearing is so pervasive and familiar it’s something we rarely fully appreciate. Recent discoveries in the field of auditory neuroscience point to how amazing and miraculous our ability to listen actually is.
Our hearing sense is a chain of processes that starts when sound waves travel through the air to our eardrums at 767 miles per hour. Although it’s fast, the actual energy in the sound wave is very small. Thousands of tiny hair cells in the inner ear amplify these little molecular movements, changing the vibrations into electrical signals that are then transmitted by the auditory nerve to the brain. Although the mechanics of the ear are a sophisticated product of evolution, the brain does the real work of making sense of the sound signal.
If you listen to a section of recorded classical opera your brain separates the singer’s voice from the orchestral instruments and you can even focus on just the violins, or flute if you choose. Music producers use the best performers, auditoriums, and microphones and record at high definition, and we hear the results through speakers and headphones that have never been more accurate. Given this technology, there’s a step in the chain that’s even more amazing; how the brain then constructs the whole thing again in your head. Speakers just create sound waves; your brain puts together the mix of pitch, timbre, harmony, volume, rhythm, and location in space in real time. The philosopher’s thought experiment, “If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?” is relevant here as, on one level, the tree falling only creates vibrations and waves through the air; it takes a brain to hear sounds. Almost like a silent disco, where people dance together to music played through personal headphones, everyone in a concert is actually surrounded by sound vibrations in the air, while their brains construct the symphony in their heads.
Fully appreciating and connecting with our senses is an important part of mindfulness practice. Hearing is significant as many of our thoughts are verbal, and we build more authentic, and intimate relationships with others by fully listening.
Also, bringing our attention and awareness to our sense of hearing directly connects us to this flowing moment of experience. Even when we’re listening to a past recording, we’re never anywhere else than in the present moment.
In meditation, we can use our hearing to an extended soundscape and connect with a sense of spaciousness that helps us break free from feelings of limitation, into a more expanded sense of self. Most of our attention is drawn to objects and content, rather than the space around them. In fact, 96% of the known universe and over 99% of every cell in our body is empty space. So, noticing the space around words, thoughts and feelings gives us the freedom of not being completely consumed and bound up in them. Instead of believing we’re only that thought, or we’re only that emotion, we can see the thought or emotion as content with energy and know that we’re not our thoughts or emotions.
There’s so much more to our sense of hearing than we assume, which is an “everyday miracle” we often take for granted. By fully appreciating and exploring our sense of hearing with awareness, we can gain insights into other people, ourselves, and the world around us, leading to a richer and more vital life experience.
Suggested weekly practice
- Remember to simply stop and listen during the day and appreciate the soundscape just as it is at that moment.
- Try connecting to your hearing to bring yourself back into the present moment.
- To recover a bit of peace and spaciousness, reach out with your sense of hearing to the most distant sounds, see if you can push your awareness just a little beyond, and rest in the expanded, aware space for a few moments.
Guidance
Find somewhere undisturbed and sit in a comfortable, dignified and upright posture, where you can remain alert and aware.
There are two guided practices for this session. You can close your eyes, or lower your gaze while the meditations play.
- Play the settling practice, then read through the session content, which you can print off if that helps
- Then play the second audio to open up the sensitivity of our hearing, mindfully experiencing the sounds that are already in the world around us, without interpretation or judgement and in appreciation and gratitude for this powerful and important sense
