Dream, Yoga, Lucid: Kyhaar's Workbook
I've never done anything like this before, so here goes nothing. I thought I would start off with the Basic Skills: Lesson #1 (Sensory Awareness Meditation). The beginning is a good place to begin, right?
Hopefully I do this right and don't mess up. I feel like my life is the opposite of yoga and meditation and all that. I'm always on the go, always doing something, tuning out everything so that I can do homework or studying. It's worked too well, unfortunately.
I am going to work at this lesson for a couple of days (and the different versions / levels), but here is my very first experience:
Basic Skills: Lesson #1:
Version 1, Lvl 1 and 2:
I decided to perform this exercise from my chair in front of my computer. It's not what most people would define as a "comfy chair," but I find it suitable enough (I can read in it for hours). So I let myself relax and closed my eyes. Rightly or wrongly, I find it easier to focus on auditory cues when I am not distracted by sight.
The first things I noticed were a) the hum of my laptop, b) my mom performing tasks downstairs, c) the ticking of my clock and then, half a second-later, d) the sound of the road / outside / distant traffic (not really sure what it was).
Then, after a minute or so of just listening, I noticed that the ticking of the clock actually had two different tones, different pitches. High-low. High-low. I also noticed that my laptop not only hummed, but made an erratic clicking noise. There was also another "sound of the road" different from the original one.
After this, I tried to focus on experiencing them all at once (I think I counted 6/7 "different" sounds); however, I was only able to hold on to 4 of them: the ticking of my clock (in general), my computer humming, the sound of the road (in general) and the faint click-ticking of my laptop. In essence, almost all the subtler sounds faded when I tried to experience them all: the louder, more dominant sounds (with the exception of the clicking/ticking) drowned them.
I always thought my house was silent. After performing this activity, even though it is "silent" in the sense of minimal movement, no talking, no music, etc. it was pretty noisy!
I was reading someone's example of applying the listening exercise to music and trying to hear all the layers. I know I still need to come up with an example of my own, but I wanted to test myself to see if I reacted to the different layers of music differently than I reacted to "non-music" sounds. I loved the idea, and I love music. I found it easy to IDENTIFY the different layers (ex. listening for the drums / bass / melody / lyrics / other), but I could only FOCUS on 2 or 3 at a time. I have slight musical training in band, and we had to do this in band in order to make sure our instruments were not dominating the other instruments / out of tune etc.
During the brief 1-2 second moments when I experienced all the parts, it was amazing. I never knew that listening to the drum line of a song could be so interesting! Usually I only listen to the melody since that's the thing I care about most when listening to music. I think I blocked out the entire non-music world when I did this, however. During one of the songs I listened to, my father came home and began talking to my mother. I couldn't focus on hearing their conversation AND on the music. It's like the words of the music interfered with their words. I've got a 2-hour car ride coming up soon, so I am going to use that time to do some more practice and/or try to come up with a practice activity of my own to share in this workbook.
Hopefully I've done my first entry right!
