Human beings have figured out all kinds of ways to meditate. If Amar Chitra Katha was to be believed you have to do a lot of standing in loincloth on one leg. Sound meditation luckily allows you to sit firmly. In this method, you are told to let sounds come to you. You keep your eyes closed, ears open and pay attention to all the sounds around you — the scraping of furniture in the apartment above you, the persistent crow outside and the sound of television next door. You don’t attempt to identify the sounds or think about them. You don’t have to worry about whether the sounds will increase in volume, decrease, end or begin. You try to pay attention without expectations.

If you’ve ever tried sound meditation, you know it gives you a startling battery recharge, of feeling brightly, fully alive. Perhaps because we spend a lot of our time protecting our ears and selves by tuning out noise. Not listening is a vital skill after all. One of the difficulties that people who wear hearing aids face is tuning out background noise. So much so that in the last couple of years, there’ve been a lot of attempts by people hacking the hardware of their hearing aids to make it suit their individual hearing needs. And those who consider themselves part of Deaf culture (with a capital D) reject the notion that deafness is a disability. Deaf culture is just different from hearing culture. So those who are part of Deaf culture don’t seek hearing aids or cochlear implants, believing firmly that deafness is not something to be ‘fixed’.

A couple of years ago I fell in love with a teen show called Switched at Birth , interesting for many reasons but most cool for the slow and total acclimatisation of Deaf culture for viewers. For me, additionally cool because this is not a show I can hear in the background while folding clothes and sorting papers and wandering around my house as I usually do, feeling guilty for not being respectful to the Golden Age of American Television. Switched at Birth is a show that requires you to watch faces, hands, lips and subtitles. This is a show that once had a completely silent episode. It’s a show that rewards attention. And in a roundabout way this is like sound meditation, helping you focus on sensory perception and then getting you past sensory perception.

Hearing and not hearing are also both skill-sets for living in families. All Indian families continuously demonstrate the requirement of hearing and not hearing. A friend tells me the story of her uncle feeling her up and her cousins of the same age. As young girls they told each other and then kept an eagle eye on their still younger cousins. Some years later my friend told her mother about the uncle. And of course, the mother and her cousins too had been molested by the uncle as young girls. And they too had told each other but no one else. And perhaps now, a new generation of young girls are telling each other about the uncle, creating almost a longitudinal study of abuse (as they said in the Bill Cosby case). My friend remarked families exist to maintain the status quo and they will hear only what will allow things to stay the same.

This can work, of course, in other surprising ways. One of my closest friends growing up went through a brief but magnificent party girl phase in college. One night, she came home past midnight roaring drunk but convinced that having brushed her teeth twice she was safe. She grinned jauntily at her mother who opened the door, walked steadily past her, walked steadily upstairs to her room. All would have been well if she hadn’t stopped on the landing to have a long conversation with the straw elephant hanging on the wall. Her mother pretended not to hear and never brought it up.

I’ve always been a talker and been surrounded by talkers. In recent times I’ve caught myself listening less and less. Partly, it is a decreasing patience for banalities and partly, a terror of my own to-do list. I’ve found myself interrupting, tuning out and thinking (like Eddie Izzard’s squirrel) about whether I’ve left the gas on. Because of course I wasn’t paying attention to the gas either. As little attention as I was paying to the person in front of me.

This year I found a meditation app that shocked me with how much it improved my well-being. I am easily shocked by the excellence of things that humanity has known is excellent for thousands of years. Exercise, meditation, kindness! Who knew that it really is all good stuff? So I do it occasionally and talk about it the rest of the time as if I do it regularly.

But I am working at it now, on good days taking metaphorical deep breaths and listening to the words coming out of people’s mouths and on very good days, hearing past the words.

( Nisha Susan is a writer and editor of the feminist web site The Ladies Finger)

Follow Nisha Susan @chasingiamb

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