Balancing the Senses: A Meditation on Presence
By Thomas McConkie, based on an episode of Mindfulness+.
You can follow along with this extended meditation here.
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Take a moment to settle in.
Whatever you're doing, wherever you are, just gather awareness in the physical body.
Feel sensation flowing in this moment, feel the ground beneath you, and feel the flow of breath. Without any special effort — just having an intention to become more fully present — we find that settling in just kind of happens.
Let the belly soften, expanding and contracting with the breath.
Because awareness is all-pervasive, throughout all of experience, it's not very difficult to contact. And when we contact awareness, we naturally start to taste the flavor of stillness in our experience: peace and serenity, but also tremendous dynamism, power, and spontaneity.
[Silence]
Focus on just softening right now, letting the settling process occur.
And whether you're in stillness or in motion, just appreciate that you're aware. You're aware of experience, aware of sensory experience, and aware of awareness.
Something that's interesting about awareness is that as human beings, we tend to pay attention in a very specific and habitual way. If we notice what we’re experiencing in a given moment throughout the day, it's likely that a lot of our attention will be going to thoughts in the mind as well as to our visual experience. There are biological and evolutionary reasons for this. And there are cultural reasons that these tendencies get reinforced.
In this meditation we’re just going to intentionally shift the way we're paying attention, redistributing our attention more evenly across the whole spectrum of sensory experience.
You can start in this moment by bringing awareness to hearing. Notice the experience of hearing, opening up awareness to the soundscape: 360 degrees around and above you, below you. Notice what sound is happening and what a marvel that we can hear it all. Just allow yourself to become fascinated by hearing. Never mind what you're hearing — just that you are hearing. In this way we give awareness a little bit of a stretch, starting to flow more energy and awareness into the mode of hearing.
Stay with it, just another moment. Aware of hearing.
[Silence]
Good. Now shift your awareness to sensation throughout the body. Maybe you're outdoors and feel the touch of sun on your skin. Maybe the caress of the breeze, the support of the ground beneath you, the touch of your clothing to your skin. Just shift your awareness to feeling.
And again, as we do this, we're not worried about what we're feeling. Maybe your sensations in this moment are mostly comfortable, or maybe they're uncomfortable — or maybe some blend of both, which is usually the case. Notice your capacity as you do this to receive the experience of feeling awareness, to be aware of feeling. What a marvel that we have bodies and can feel at all.
See if you're able to allow awareness to expansively focus on the entire physical body. Just feeling the flow, the cascade of sensation through awareness. If you notice that tension fixating on one small area of sensation, just notice that and relax. Open back up to holding the entire body in awareness.
And if your attention contracts into a thought in the mind or a sound around you, you can just notice that and practice letting go, coming back to feeling awareness.
[Silence]
Good. Now bring attention to seeing, and as you really put your awareness into the mode of seeing, be surprised. Be in wonder that you have eyes at all and that you can see, never mind what you're seeing. You could be staring at the magnificence of the Grand Canyon or you could be staring at a blank wall, and the miracle of seeing is not diminished in either case. Just notice in this moment, awareness taking the shape of seeing. Note how effortless it is to see. You don't have to strain to see the light of the world. It just streams in like sunlight through stained glass windows, pouring into creating the experience, seeing spontaneously, effortlessly. Notice that it's not you who is seeing. Seeing is just happening.
[Silence]
And here comes the fun part. Keeping awareness on the experience of seeing, start to embrace and include the other two modes of experience we were working with. Notice this sense of hearing just happening without effort. Notice feeling just happening without effort. Feeling is happening, hearing is happening, seeing is happening — they're all just happening.
And as you include all three of these modalities at once, you may find your gaze starting to relax in a natural way. You can still see perfectly fine, but your gaze is softer. There's less intensity, less of a laser-like quality to your sense of seeing. You're just allowing the light to pour in your eyes, the sound to pour into your ears, all of sensation to light up your senses. It's happening all at once. We tend to really unconsciously pour most of our awareness in a given moment into what we're looking at, either out in the world or some image in our mind. So we're thinking, I just feel this new balance. It's a bit like riding a bicycle. Once you get the hang of it, the balance just happens. Feel what it's like to be an equilibrium with all the senses at once.
Seeing, hearing, feeling — all different shapes of awareness, awareness, effortlessly happening.
But who is it that's aware?
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As you go about your day or go about your life. Once in a while you can come back to this meditation, and you can just notice in a given moment how much attention is going towards seeing and then consciously soften the gaze a little bit, soften the gaze so that you're not staring at anything particularly out in space, but just letting the light pour back into your eyes.
And if you pay attention in a particular way, you'll notice your sense of hearing open up, your sense of feeling open up. You can drop back into this dynamic equilibrium of sensory experience. You can come back to presence powerfully again and again.
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