Meditation with your senses is a powerful technique for increasing your fulfilment, gaining insights into your mind, training up your attention skills and bringing you to non-conceptual awareness.
Besides that, it’s often a highly pleasant experience: when we pay exquisite attention to the senses and aim to fully experience them as they are, we realise they are orders of magnitude richer than we usually perceive them to be.
You’ll learn a basic process you can use for meditating on the senses, how to do it formally and during daily life, and the common traps involved. AND you get two free guided meditations to help you assimilate the technique.
Meditation is all about focus, and this technique is fantastic for training it.
This is one of my favourite meditation techniques. It’s so simple, yet deeply powerful and revealing. It’s also very adaptable to everyday life.
Let’s get ourselves prepped first.
Posture for Formal Meditation
If you’re going to do this formally, i.e. in a quiet space, sitting in a meditation posture and using a timer, it’s crucial you get your posture right. Make sure you choose the right posture for you and run the three-step posture process before you begin.
Meditation on Sight
Once we’ve found a posture we like and have prepared ourselves, it’s time to start meditating. Let’s use the example of sight.
Have your eyes open gently: not staring, not closed. Just let in your surround without looking at it. We start by looking at the entire scene around us, without paying attention to anything in particular.
You’ll notice that within a few seconds, your attention will naturally hone in on a particular object or part of the visual field.
When it does, we hold it there, and pour our attention on to that object or area. While we do that, we start to detect details, like the shapes, the colours, the tones, and textures.
Do not stare at the object or strain your eyes. It’s important to do this with a light touch. And all of this is non-conceptual. We’re not analysing like an art critic: we’re just sensing, contacting the raw visual information.
Stay with that object or sight for a few seconds and then open up your attention again to the entire visual field. Let your eyes move around a little bit. Then your eyes will land on another object, and you run that cycle again.
Of course, your attention will wander from time to time. This is just an inherent part of the practice. When you notice you’re lost, return to the start of a cycle and begin again.
Continue running those cycles for the duration of your session.
Use this guided meditation to help you meditate on sights.
Meditation on Sound
We do the same process with sounds too.
Have your attention open, listening without listening to anything in particular. Then your attention will naturally zone in on a particular sound or group of sounds. You can do this with silence too.
When it does, you hold that sound in your attention, pour your attention into it, and try to detect details like tone, pitch, volume, movement, change, location, and so forth.
Again, we’re not analysing like a music expert or getting experimental data. We’re getting sensory data, tapping into the raw experience of the sound. We’re just trying to hear it exactly as it is, as fully as we can.
You either follow that sound until it disappears, or if it persists, you can move on after a few seconds. In any case, we start again, opening up our attention.
Meditation On All Senses
You’ve learned the basic process for meditating on the senses, demonstrated with sight and sound in turn. These are the most fundamental senses, and this meditation is easiest to explain with these two. You can combine the two senses, alternating your cycles between one and the other.
You can also do this with taste, touch and smell. You can really use this for anything that you’re experiencing, including the body and your thoughts.
It also works very well with eating meditation. The difference is that you control the rhythm at which you receive new input, new taste and touch sensations in your mouth. But the basic cycles work the same way.
Use this guided meditation to help you to meditate on sounds.
Traps & Tips for Meditation with the Senses
As with all meditation, you’ll know when you’re doing meditation with the senses correctly, but there are also several traps you can fall into. After teaching this many times to people, I’ve seen that this is a subtle and sometimes elusive meditation. These tips will help you overcome the common difficulties.
Let The Senses Come to You
One thing that’s really important in this meditation is to let the senses come to you.
This meditation isn’t about trying to look more intensely at or listen to the sights or sounds. It’s more of an allowing. It’s a subtle shift in attention away from its usual centre (our head, mind, and sense of self), and letting our attention be overtaken by the raw input from the visual and/or auditory field that comes to us.
Often when we’re working with the senses, we get all tense and try to chase after them. We try to see or hear more than is actually there. If you do this, you’ll feel like you’re trying to make something happen.
Free yourself of that burden. You don’t have to make anything happen! The senses are already right here, right now, exactly as they appear to be. Just let them come to you, let them occupy your attention.
Sure, to the untrained meditator, this allowing is quite tricky. But let’s start from that frame of reference, and we’ll more easily contact that state of allowing and of being overtaken.
Balance Ease with Effort
Closely related to this, I suggest you try to find a balance between ease and effort. If there’s too much effort, it becomes a strain, and we’re probably overthinking the technique. Too much ease, and we’re probably in our ordinary state of mind, unless we’re a highly trained meditator.
Let the senses come to you, and every time you run a cycle, give it your all. But don’t do it forcefully. You also don’t do it lazily! Just let yourself be grounded in and grounded by the senses.
When you balance ease with effort, you’ll notice that you feel grounded and present, a shift in your state of mind, but it will feel relaxed and open too.
Beware of Commenting
As you practice meditation on the senses, you’ll discover that your mind is constantly commenting on them. This also happens during the day, of course.
For example, you have your attention open, you’re looking around, and then your eyes come to rest on a plant that’s in the room.
As soon as you hold the sight of the plant in your attention, all these associations will come up: “So-and-so bought that plant,” and “We water it every once a week,” and “Oh, look, it’s doing really well!”.
This is just how the human mind works. It works by association, which is a very powerful capacity. But don’t confuse this meditation with association: we’re not trying to get a better mental concept of the world around us.
We’re trying to see and hear things exactly as they are. For the purposes of this meditation, the plant is just how it looks, the raw visual information that you perceive. It’s not all your associations.
When you have associations, you’ll notice that they take over your attention. When this happens, I just want you to redirect your attention back to the raw sensory input, or to once again let that raw input take over your attention. In this case, that’s the sight of the plant.
You don’t have to stamp out these associations. Just direct your attention back to your senses, trying to ground your awareness in them, rather than in your concepts. Do this and you’ll have a much better chance of practicing this meditation successfully.
You may be thinking you are enjoying the sunset itself, but actually you are only experiencing it through the veil of your embellishments with past sunsets and other memories and ideas that this one triggered in you.
If we live like this for months and years, we may miss some of our most precious moments in life, like time with loved ones, the sights, the sounds, the tastes, the feeling of simply being alive. We might miss a great part of the best moments of our lives.Jon kabat-zinn
Meditation on Senses in Everyday Life
This is a very good meditation for everyday life: when you’re walking around outside, doing housework, and so forth. It’s one of the most adaptable meditations I know.
The cycles are the same, it’s just a bit more challenging to continue running them. You’ll notice that your mind wanders more than in formal meditation.
So that’s the challenge here: can you continue working with sight or sound despite those distractions? Can you continue while walking around in the countryside or around town?
It takes training, but it’s possible. And if you can do it, that’s a sign you’re really progressing with meditation and are beginning to untrain the habit of being constantly lost in your mind.
Because you have our visual and auditory fields all the time, you can do this meditation whenever and wherever. I like to do it when I feel scattered or really busy, because it takes me back into the present moment.
The senses are already in the present moment. When we tune into that raw sensory input, we’re about as present as we can get. You bring yourself back into the present, and you feel at ease, at home, grounded.
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The post Meditation With Your Senses: How To first appeared on Deep Psychology.
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