Inner listening – Three levels of meditating on silence

In the spirit of  silence amongst the noise,

Toby

Inner listening – Three levels of meditating on silence

Cultivating silent presence is not by any means the only way to meditate, but nevertheless it is a super important dimension of meditation. It is also one that, once you can do it, helps all your other forms of meditation as well as being an end in itself. Here are three ways to meditate on silence, the first is a doorway to the second, and the second is a doorway to the third. For the first two there are two ways to do it; listening inwardly and listening outwardly. They can be combined or focused on separately in any given session, as you wish.

Listening and observing the non-silence
The first practice is to listen to the non-silence or the noise.
On the inner level – As you turn your attention inward, this means to notice your inner conversation, and all the other ‘noise’ that is going on inside your mind, just holding the position of the observer in that space. You don’t try and stop the thoughts, rather you simply listen and notice.
On the outer level – You simply listen to the sounds going on around you, noticing them, and letting them come and go. Like the inner level the key is simply listening and noticing, and letting that be your point of stability as the sounds come and go.

Listening and observing the silence
If you listen to your inner noise in the way described above, then after a while you will notice that it starts to die down a little. Listening inwardly, you will start to notice pockets of silence between the noise. When these start to happen, pay attention to them and start to drop into them, extending the duration of them a little. Over time you will start to have more silence than inner noise. Eventually you’ll start to experience extended periods where it is almost all silence, and you drop into deeper and deeper states of meditation.
On the outer level, you can choose to focus on the silences in between the noises. After a while you will start to notice that silence is all pervasive; even when there is noise, you realize that the noise is contained by silence; that silence is present even when there are sounds around.

Listening to the sound of silence     
Once you have some experience of stages one and two, you will have probably started to notice that, when you listen to silence, both inwardly and outwardly, there is a sound. It’s kind of like a high-pitched ringing in your inner ear. If you relax with it, you may find that it makes it easier to let go of discursive thoughts and move into a thoughtless condition. Listening to the sound of silence almost puts you in a trance-like state that is very conducive to meditation and moving into deeper, non-conceptual states of awareness. On this third level the inner and outer dimension of the listening pretty much merge into the same thing, as the sound seems both ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ at the same time.

The nice thing about the above meditation is also that it can be done without having to exert much effort; it’s all listening, accepting, opening to. It can be done when you are tired and want to relax, as well as when you want to sit down and really do some focused inner work!

© Toby Ouvry 2022, you are welcome to use or share this article, but please cite Toby as the source and include reference to his website www.tobyouvry.com

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The workshop will give an overview and introduce some simple but profound shamanic practices on day one, with a deeper dive into Shamanic meditation practices on day two…read full details