Hearing
The subtle art of hearing the world around us without differentiation.
This is the beginning of a series exploring simple routes into being here. These are the approaches I use every day with people, and the same ones I return to in my own life. Hearing, seeing, feeling and eventually all of them. Ordinary senses that become portals when we meet them directly, without trying to change anything. Each sense offers a different way in, a different texture of contact with what is already happening.
The sense I usually start with in treatment is hearing. Listening openly to all the sounds around us, in the body, in the room, outside. But not to discern what they are. Not to categorise or understand. Simply to let sound become a single soundstage, one continuity.
As I sit with people, it’s interesting to witness how accessible this is. Sight tends to pull people into differentiation, naming, interpreting. Hearing softens people back into themselves once the habitual this is this, that is that pauses. The whole field softens. I feel it in my own body and in the space around us. There is a particular quality to being with someone as that sense of me, me, me loosens and opens wider. It is joyful, easy, open, soft, even playful. It does not require anything.
Perhaps hearing feels more available because we treat it as secondary, not used as much by the conscious thinking mind. Perhaps it offers a more direct route into an older part of the nervous system, something more autonomic, more ancient.
When we open our senses like this, something subtle happens. There is a signal that says we are safe, we are here, we can trust this. And this is interesting, because hearing has been the sense I have struggled with most throughout my life.
Childhood ear infections, glue ear, grommets, T-tubes. Balance issues in my twenties. Hearing loss and tinnitus in my thirties. Temporary complete deafness in my forties. Now hearing aids and a constant awareness of what I can or cannot hear in conversation, at parties, in groups. It generates a tension in my system, a kind of high alert, a background sense of what am I missing, a feeling of being displaced. Not quite here.
And yet the act of simply listening, even to the unpleasant or disorienting inner sounds of my own ears, can be soothing in the right frame. Somehow reassuring.
I often wonder what the lesson is for those of us who struggle with one of our senses.
I remember the profound fear when my hearing vanished completely one day as I got out of a swimming pool. I thought there was water in my ear. The sound eventually returned, a minor miracle. A medic told me that sudden hearing loss can be more destabilising than losing vision. And as I write this, I can feel the tightness in my chest, the unexpressed scream, the primordial fear.
In Chinese thought the ears are linked to the kidneys. The emotion is fear. The kidneys store our Jing, our inherited energy, our ancestral reserve. I have never been entirely sure about these explanations, they can feel abstract. But what I do know in my own body is that hearing touches something primordial. A deep sense of safety, or the lack of it, that resonates through the whole system.
The kidneys also represent the Zhi, which is the will or endurance in Daoist philosophy. So perhaps when we deplete ourselves by over-exerting our will in the world, or when we stop listening to our internal senses, or find ourselves in situations where we cannot see another way, all of which I have experienced in my life, something in this deeper system becomes strained. Hearing, in that sense, reveals more than sound; it reveals the state of our underlying resilience.
So what is the lesson? I am not sure there is one. Only that we have many ways of paying attention, many ways of finding reassurance in what is already here.
Not by turning it into something more,
but by listening to what is already present.
