I have practiced this exercise a few times during the past years and I feel it is a powerful way to have our usual sense of ‘me’ and ‘myself’ challenged. Boundaries seem to dissolve between ‘me here’ and ‘the world out there’ and it is even difficult to describe ‘what is going on out there’ from an ‘I – here’ perspective!
What I mean is that ‘everything’ seems to coexist. The sounds are not separate from my ears, they arise together through my throat. The distress of the dog barking in the night touches the affliction of my own heart; however the ‘heart’ does not seem to be mine anymore. There is just ‘heart’ and ‘affliction’ being expressed nearby, now and then, by this barking dog. A new quality seems to be operating, a sensitivity replacing the usual conceptual mind and a more intuitive mode of being. The TSK experiences are difficult to be expressed by words, even more by a second language! Does this experience make sense to anyone?
MARCIA
Hi, Marcia,
I similarly relate to the “marrying” concept in this way. Whilst practising this exercise last Monday, I reached a point where I actually seemed to be “breathing” the sound, where the sounds passed into and out from me as the breath. There really was no difference between sound and breath – just a unity of experience (and not much sense of the “ego self” either).
Hi Marcia,
I think you put your finger on a very important element in this practice. We are asked to focus on something ‘inside’ (breath) and something ‘outside’ (sound) and marry them. If you compare this to the way inside and outside are usually divided from one another (as described in ch. 5 of LOK), this is a radical change. Your description of how that change manifests for you is good.
Often in TSK we say that everyone’s experience with an exercise may be different. But in the case of this exercise, it seems fair to point to this common theme, which is there for everyone to explore.