Mind and throat

I appreciate David’s and Hayward’s posts.  I feel I should contribute something, even though inspiration eludes me.  Life David, I rememberdiscovering wonderful insights while practicing Marriage of Sound and Breath.  In my case it was during a week-long retreat at the Nyingma Institute with Bob Pasternak.  Awareness sinking into the throat and finding both sound and breath intermingling with one another, no distance or separation between mind and what mind notices.  It was beautifully refreshing and open.  I expect that has stayed with me to this day, 25 years later, as a glimpse of a world unfettered by the wearied constructs of my ordinary experiences.  This evening sitting and attending to breath, the throat, and sounds, I find that my ears don’t readily give up their position outside my head, closer to the seat of thought than to the sphere of breath.  Mind and breath seem such close neighbors to one another, but they hold back from engagement, rather like the distance between things in the set-up world in which I usually live.  Perhaps tomorrow morning, before our call, I’ll find myself sinking down into the breath and sounds will come home wagging their tails behind them. — Michael