"‘What do you hear?’ he asked me.
‘Nothing. The silence.’
‘We are not smart enough to be able to listen to the silence! We are just human beings, and we don’t even know how to listen to our own ramblings.”
– Paulo Coehlo, The Pilgrimage.
Today, just listen to the silence. See if you can find it…
There is a meditation that I love to do, called the listening exercise. It is based on a meditation I discovered, in Paulo Coelho’s book, The Pilgrimage.
The listening exercise:
Relax.
Close your eyes.
Try for several minutes to concentrate on all of the sounds you hear in your surroundings, as if you were hearing an orchestra playing its instruments.
Little by little, try to separate each sound from the others. Concentrate on each one, as if it were the only instrument playing. Try to eliminate the other sounds from your awareness.
Do this exercise for ten to twenty minutes at a time.
Here is what Paulo Coehlo found when he listened:
“I began to perform the exercise.
I heard the wind and a woman’s voice far in the distance, and at one point I sensed that a branch was being broken.
It was not a difficult exercise, and I was fascinated by its sim- plicity. I put my ear to the ground and began to listen to the muted sounds of the earth.
After a few moments, I began to separate the sounds from each other: the sound of the leaves rustling, the sound of the voice in the distance, and the noise of the beating of the wings of birds. An animal grunted, but I could not identify what kind of beast it was.
The fifteen minutes I spent on the exercise flew by.”
– Paulo Coehlo, The Pilgrimage.
When you listen to the silence, what do you hear?
What do you find there?
[image / patty]
ANDO / LIVING ZEN RETREAT / DAY 15 / MONDAY 19 JANUARY 2014, 14:00.