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Zen and mindfulness teacher Henry Shukman guides us in a meditation that invites us to listen deeply and find clarity in quiet.
How To Do This Practice:
- Find Stillness: Sit comfortably in a quiet space. Close your eyes if you’d like, and allow your body to settle.
- Bring Your Attention to the Present: Take a few deep breaths. Let go of to-do lists or distractions, gently arriving in this moment.
- Tune In to the Sounds Around You: Begin to notice the soundscape of your environment. Near or far, loud or soft. Don’t judge or label the sounds, just hear them.
- Notice Background Silence: Beyond individual sounds, sense the quiet in which all sounds arise. This isn’t just an absence of noise, it’s a felt sense of stillness.
- Soak in the Quiet: Rest your awareness in this space of quiet. Let it wash over you, soften you, and bring you back to yourself.
- Gently Return: When you’re ready, bring small movements back to your body. Wiggle your fingers or stretch. Open your eyes and carry this quiet awareness into the rest of your day.
Today’s Happiness Break Guide:
Henry Shukman, is a poet, mindfulness teacher, and author of Original Love: The Four Inns on the Path of Awakening.
Learn more about Shukman’s work:
Order his book, Original Love: The Four Inns on the Path of Awakening:
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Find Calm When You Can’t Clear Your Mind:
A Meditation on Original Love and Interconnectedness:
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Transcription:
SHUKA KALANTARI: Hi everyone, I’m Shuka Kalantari, and this is Happiness Break, where we share short, science-backed practices to help you connect with yourself, and the world around you.
The 13th century Persian mystic and poet Rumi wrote, “Let silence take you to the core of life.”
And that’s what we’re exploring this week: silence. Because it’s often in those quiet moments that we can really connect with ourselves
Research tells us that cultivating inner quiet can help process emotion and even change our brain structure–improving focus, sensory perception and motor skills.
Silence can also help us reduce stress and find more clarity.
Today, Zen and mindfulness teacher Henry Shukman guides us through a practice in silence, inviting us to truly listen.
So when you’re ready, here’s Henry.
HENRY SHUKMAN: In this meditation, we’re going to explore quiet, we’re going to explore coming back to a state of quiet that we can all always access a beautiful quiet, that in some ways is kind of intrinsic to our awareness. One way that we can access it more clearly is in fact by paying closer attention to the sense experience of hearing.
Let’s settle ourselves right now, coming into stillness and giving ourselves a moment to sense and feel what it’s like to give ourselves a little time of stillness, of just being.
As we’re sitting still, let’s start to listen. Open up to the sound field. All around you. There might be some individual sounds. Sounds that come and go.
Just hear them.
You don’t have to do anything. Just be with the sounds of the immediate vicinity and perhaps the neighborhood.
And there may also be continuous background sounds. There very commonly are. Maybe a soft hum, or a light hiss, or a kind of distant roar.
Listen closely.
Listen in.
Listen.
And see if you can sense a kind of quiet, it’s not exactly just auditory, it’s a sense of quiet. Let yourself bathe and bask, soak in quietness.
Let quietness restore you, bring you back to who you most deeply are.
Bring you back to you.
So rest here as long as you like.
If you feel like you’d like to continue resting here, you can hit pause. And stay as long as you like.
If it’s time for you to end this meditation, then wiggle your fingers, wiggle your toes, bringing some movement back into the body. Raise your eyes, perhaps stretch a little.
Again, my name is Henry Shukman.
I want to thank you for joining me in this little meditation.
Coming back to a state of quiet that we can always access. It’s always here for us.
