I am sitting in a beautiful little apartment at my friends’ beach house on Dog Island, a small barrier island situated in the Gulf of Mexico in the Big Bend area off the coast of Florida. It’s such a lovely retreat after days, weeks and even months of what has felt like nonstop movement. Work, holidays (plus big birthday!), family visits, group sound healing events, preparation for traveling, teaching, and in the midst of all that, organizing my house after having the last of my “stuff” finally brought down to NC from Rhode Island. Somehow trying to land while feeling like I am in constant motion.
So here is an interesting connection which is just coming to me in this moment. I was listening, just before I started writing this, to a satsang by Manorama about nāda- the Sanskrit word for sound, which is more specifically referring to inner sound, sometimes called divine sound or celestial harmony. What she pointed out, which I loved, is that the outer sound that we hear- all of the sounds around us- birds, airplanes, sirens, the humming of the refrigerator, could be thought of as the “grandchildren” of the inner sound current that is always there in all things. It is audible when we tune in and get quiet. Learning how to listen, hear, recognize and meditate on it is a practice. Her point was that we can listen to all any and all of those things and have them become a part of our meditation, that we can be still and merge with the nāda as part of our ongoing daily practice. In other words we can use them as tools for our practice rather than a distraction from our practice.
What occurred to me as I began writing this post is that I can be still and quiet in the midst of all of this constant motion I have been in- that I can use it all as a reminder to connect more deeply, rather than something that pulls me away from myself.
It also brings to mind Sister Dang Nghiem’s teaching on the bells of mindfulness- that we can use our breath, the sound of our phones, cars honking, any of the sounds around us as bells of mindfulness.
To be distracted or to be connected, that is question!