Coming Back To Our Senses

We explore how to receive sights and sounds instead of chasing them, and why “looking through” loosens labels and brings clarity. We share practical ways to work with music, nature sounds, and eyes open or closed, and why silence can be the most healing teacher.

• moving from grasping to receiving sense experience
• looking at vs looking through and deconstructing perception
• working with labels and memories that cloud clarity
• using nature sounds, random audio, and gentle music
• eyes open or closed strategies and toggling
• everyday practice in stores, restaurants, and at home
• the role of silence and long pauses for settling
• beginner’s mind as a continuous, living practice

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• Real-world insights for therapists, coaches, yoga teachers, educators, and caregivers
• Gentle reflections for anyone navigating stress, anxiety, burnout, grief, or change

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Transcript

Returning To The Senses

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Welcome to the Mindfulness Exercises Podcast. My name is Sean Fargo. Today we're going to be coming to our senses. Which is to say that we're going to be exploring mindfulness of our senses. Seeing, smelling, hearing, tasting, feeling. Because most of us, myself included, will often look at things and very subtly move out of our bodies and move towards the object that we're seeing rather than receiving the sights through the eyes and into the body. When we hear something, our attention often goes outward towards the sound instead of receiving the sounds through the ears, staying centered and grounded in our bodies. So today we're going to be exploring how we leave ourselves and how we can come back to our actual senses through the ears and the nose and the mouth and the eyes. And also what do we do when we sense? Do we see it or hear it or taste it for what it actually is, or do we label it, think about it, process memories about what it is, tell ourselves stories about what it is or what it means? So this is a simple mindfulness practice of simply noticing what we do when we sense. And can we come back to our senses?

SPEAKER_02 2:03

Hi, Sean.

SPEAKER_00 2:04

Welcome everyone.

SPEAKER_02 2:06

So I do go to the Sunday Sangas with Will Kabatzin. And this last lesson, he was talking about this idea of the difference between looking at something and looking through something. And I just wanted to get a little bit of clarification. The way I understand it is sort of this idea that with Vipamasna, when you're trying to actually be with what's really there, to feel what's really there, or to see with clarity what's really there. That's the goal. Rather than sort of having this mindset, maybe, or a lens where you're looking through a particular, maybe you're a depressive mindset or an anxious mindset. Is that what it is? I couldn't quite exactly get it when he was describing it. And what's the importance of it?

SPEAKER_00 2:55

There's kind of a few ways that we can practice this or talk about it. So in terms of like looking through, I think what he's referencing is sensing what's actually here or what's actually there rather than overlabeling things.

SPEAKER_02 3:19

When he's talking about looking at something, you mean the at would be the labeling, yeah. Oh, the at would be the labeling. Oh.

Receiving Experience, Not Labeling

SPEAKER_00 3:28

I don't want to pretend like I know exactly what like a full context here is with Will, but I'll mention a few say teachings on this. Okay. In Zen, there's a common teaching around labels. It can be taught through the paradigm of hearing or seeing or smelling, but when we sense something, it's easy to feel like, oh, I've seen that a million times, and then we kind of check out and we don't actually pay attention to this experience of what we're seeing. And the teaching I usually give is around seeing a bird. It could easily like see a bird, but not actually see the bird. It's like I'm seeing my memory of a thousand birds that I've seen before instead of actually seeing this bird in its full birdness. There's also a practice of looking at something where a lot of us will kind of leave our bodies by moving outwards towards what our eyes are looking at. And it's as if we're there's this forward momentum of looking out and almost like capturing things with our eyes, rather than receiving sights into the eyeballs. And so there's this energetic difference between looking out into the world and receiving the world through the eyes, or through the ears or through any of the senses, right? Exactly. And so, like with a mindfulness practice, the invitation is to receive. So receiving the sounds of the birds into the ears, or whatever the sounds are, we can even dismantle like the concept of bird into the pitch and the frequency and the tone and the timbre, the actual energies of sound into the ears in real time, and the layers of sound and silence in receiving them into the ears in real time. Same for sights, colors, depths, the space between the objects is also what we see. Like color, light, all the qualities of seeing. Can we kind of notice more of these qualities as we receive them into the eye? So there's this more of a centered groundness when we practice receiving. Like we're remembering where we are. We're right here. So there's this quality of receiving instead of looking out.

SPEAKER_02 6:45

So this could be either during a formal meditation or just as you're living your life.

Deconstructing Perception And Impermanence

SPEAKER_00 6:52

Yeah, i.e. right now. I've hung out with Will quite a bit and sat with him on retreats, and I know he has novel ways of describing things, which I love and I appreciate, and I think he's a fantastic teacher. So I don't exactly know what he meant by looking through. My guess is right now he's teaching some kind of intensive on something. Yeah. You know, he's done intensives on the four foundations of mindfulness and an Apanasati and all sorts of Tiravada Buddhist teachings. But I'll just comment on looking through in that lens, which is that like say when we look at each other or anybody, including, you know, noticing the physical features of what we can see, and a common practice, like when I was at the monastery, was looking, say, through a human being as skin, flesh, bone, blood, all the different parts of our anatomy. We would study corpses and all the stuff that makes us human beings physically. We can kind of see through the body in the sense that we can see that it's not just this beautiful woman. There's this mammalian creature made up of all these different anatomical parts, all sorts of energies that we're conscious of, and many more that we're not. Sometimes when we look through something, we can kind of deconstruct it into its many parts and remember that we're all of the nature to die and decompose. Not to be dark or macabre, but to see through the story that we tell ourselves around the permanence of life or the stories that we make up around who each other are as personalities or types of people, that there's way more beneath the surface. And can we see through some of those layers? I see. Just a guess that maybe what Will was pointing to, maybe.

SPEAKER_02 9:24

I got confused in my mind because there was a Beatles song a long time ago about I'm looking through you. And it was, I'm looking through you, do I really see you? Or you're looking through me, or something, and it was like you don't really see me. You're looking right through me. You're not talking about that kind of an idea at all. Yours is a little bit different than his, but I understand what you're saying.

SPEAKER_00 9:48

Yeah. When I first started, there was this quality of like, am I actually seeing who's actually here, what's actually here, versus my memory of this type of experience a thousand times before. It's funny because I think some introverts appreciate being looked through in the sense that they want to be anonymous, they want to blend in, they don't actually want people to like notice them, you know, and other people want to be noticed, they want to do anything they can to be noticed.

SPEAKER_02 10:24

Kind of got a lot of meanings because it can also be I'm invisible, or it can also be I get you, I see right through you, or I see right through what you're trying to be. You know what I mean?

SPEAKER_00 10:36

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 10:36

So it's used different ways.

SPEAKER_00 10:38

Yeah, I'd be curious what Will was talking about. If you ever find out I'll ask him again when I see him. Cool. Hey Katya.

SPEAKER_03 10:46

Hey son, hi everyone. I have a question for you about some meditations that use uh music or nature sounds or other sounds of crystal balls. I want to hear your opinion and uh your experience and about the eyes being open or closed. So I went through some meditations that they invite you to have a candle or a fixed point, could it be an image or a flower that recommends you to close the eyes? So I would like to have your knowledge inside of uh mindfulness, but also your personal experience, because you deal with so many people what you learned about this through other people.

Music, Nature Sounds, And Mindfulness

Eyes Open Or Closed In Practice

SPEAKER_00 11:31

With mindfulness, we're simply noticing what's arising, and so we can notice all sorts of sounds and sights, whether our eyes are open or not. It's all valid. I personally, in terms of background sounds to actual guided meditations, and my preference would be something like a very tranquil creek or river sound. And I've heard and read that that's like the number one most liked background sound to a guided meditation. There's like a creek sound. I've read that the reasoning behind that is because many humans for millennia listen for running water as a source of survival, and so we have a pleasant association with running water. I do like listening to certain kinds of sounds as a formal practice or meditation, like mindfulness of sounds, and my preferred sounds are birds, nature sounds like the wind, rain, squirrels running up a tree, that type of thing. I also really like a certain artist, a musician named Duder. It's D E-U-T-E-R. He has six hundred thousand monthly listeners on Spotify. He has amazing albums of sounds. My favorite album is called Tibet Nada Himalaya, which is a collection of nature sounds, Tibetan bowls, crickets, all sorts of things. And the sounds are rather random. That's what I like practicing with are random sounds, so that I can kind of train my ear to listen for silence just as much as the presence of sound or the absence of silence. If there's a pattern of sound or a melody or something, it can be very easy for our minds to think we know what's coming and we kind of move ahead in a way. We anticipate something rather than noticing the actual unfolding of sounds if we don't know what's gonna come. Yeah, and then in terms of eyes, it's valid to have them open. I think it's easier for us to sense into our bodies with our eyes closed for the most part. Some people will not want to close their eyes at all because it doesn't feel safe to them, and that's totally fine. When we close our eyes, it's nice to kind of notice whether we're clenching our eyes. Is there a lot of stored energy around the eyes? Can we close them gently? Just noticing the face as our eyes are closed, noticing the energy, you know, the brain and the skull. All these forms of opening or closing are valid, and I think it's helpful to practice open and closed or toggling back and forth. But for the most part, when we talk about sort of a formal meditation, we're usually kind of referring to gently closing the eyes, limiting, distracting sounds as much as we can. Although these sounds are not an enemy, we can incorporate the sounds into our mindfulness practice. But if we want to say cultivate certain kinds of meditation, it can be helpful if sounds are minimal to help the mind quiet. Am I kind of getting at what you're asking about? Perfect. Thank you. Okay, cool. Thank you, Katya.

SPEAKER_01 15:58

I really like Susan Piper's, where she has the open eye meditation. I have to say that was a tough one for me to try open eyes because, like you say, it's much easier just when I close the eyes, there's less distraction. But that was interesting to experience, but eye wide open.

SPEAKER_00 16:18

Yeah. And in different places too. Eyes wide open, sitting on the couch, standing in a grocery store, at a restaurant. You know, there's so many different places we can try it. It can be very tricky.

SPEAKER_01 16:34

I don't know, it's because it's conditioned, but for me, it was very interesting.

SPEAKER_00 16:40

Absolutely.

SPEAKER_01 16:41

I really enjoy your long silence, your pause. For some reason, it really, really helped me to unfold and just relax. So I have this insight. Well, wow, I need to pause lagger for my practice and my sharing and my leading as well. So it really speaks to and remind me and encourage me to appreciate the silence more.

Practicing In Everyday Places

SPEAKER_00 17:12

Yeah, I think it's a wonderful gift to offer people that space and that quiet for them to notice their world. Extended pauses can be quite healing, be quite helpful to allow the energies of the mind and heart and body to settle or to surface or to be known or to process. Sometimes it just takes time and a little bit of patience and a little bit of care. So when we offer that to ourselves and to others within this kind of container, that can be more powerful than the words we say. Every meditation is different because we're we're brand new people in that moment. We can do the same simple quote unquote beginner's practice five times a day for 50 years, and it's still fresh, it's still poignant, it's still powerful. We don't graduate to something else. I mean, we can do all sorts of advanced practices, but it's very simple, but also refreshing itself millisecond by millisecond.