[The following is an approximate transcript of the See Hear Feel Talk audio file.]
So, today we're going to learn the See Hear Feel technique. This is Unified Mindfulness' signature technique. It's the first one we lead with, and there's a good reason for that.
At Unified Mindfulness, we like to highlight that any meditation technique you do, any at all, has the potential to develop up these three key attention skills: Concentration—the ability to focus on what you choose, Sensory Clarity—the ability to track and explore your experience as it's happening, and Equanimity—the ability to allow your experience to come and go freely without push or pull, without fighting with it. And that can help reduce tension and friction in the system.
So, these three skills we're going to get into in a lot more detail, especially after we've done the technique. It's much easier to talk about how a technique develops skills once you've had a chance to try it. But I wanted to highlight and just briefly mention these skills because one of the reasons we lead with the See Hear Feel technique is that it teaches you what's really important about techniques in general, all techniques, all meditation techniques. And that is the development of your attention in these specific ways that Unified Mindfulness just likes to spell out very clearly.
So, a lot of times we learn a technique, but we don't get the details about what the skills are that we're developing, the attention skills. And we've found that it can be really helpful and empowering for you to know exactly what those attention skills are. So, we like to spell them out and we like to put them front and center.
And one way we do that is by saying, "Hey, you can focus on anything, anything at all to develop these attention skills." But it's one thing to say that, and it's another thing to show you.
So, the See Hear Feel technique is a technique that's designed to show you how you can focus on anything and everything to develop your attention in these specific ways—Concentration, Clarity, Equanimity—and that showing you is better than telling you.
So, that's one of the reasons why we like to lead with the See Hear Feel technique as opposed to a technique like, for instance, breath focus. Because it's easy, if you're focusing on the breath, to assume, “Well, there must be something important about the breath that you're asking me to spend so much time focusing on it.” And the point is what's important is the skill development of the attention. So, you can focus on anything and everything.
Another important reason we like to lead with this is because you can do it wherever you want to. The See Hear Feel technique is very portable. And that makes it just incredibly useful, because once you get some momentum developing these skills—Concentration, Clarity, and Equanimity—you're going to start to notice some clear rewards—things like relaxation, pleasant flow of energy, emotional wellbeing, even a kind of sense of positivity, spontaneity and freeness in your experience.
So, we can start to get these pleasant rewards due to developing Concentration, Clarity, and Equanimity. And once you start to make that connection, like, "Wow, this is actually improving my life and my experience more than I imagined. I'm really able, for instance, to pay attention to my kids in a way that I wasn't able to be there for them before." Or "I'm really able to enjoy the taste of my food at a level that I wasn't able to before." Or "I'm super focused at work in a way that I was just too distracted before."
So, there are lots of really wonderful rewarding experiences we get on the inside and those translate to improved behaviors on the outside. And the See Hear Feel technique makes it possible, then, for you to develop your skills throughout your day.
So, what do I mean? I mean, while you're walking from here to there, while you are eating, while you're exercising, folding laundry, washing dishes. So, there are all these missed opportunities throughout our day—standing in line at the post office or the grocery store. These are kind of missed opportunities, because we could be, during that time, developing our skills. And something like physical exercise could be serving double duty.
I don't know about you, but if I'm going to take time doing something, I want it to have the biggest impact it possibly can have. I want to make the most of the time I'm spending doing whatever I'm doing.
So, the See Hear Feel technique is a great framework for helping you make the most out of these life activities that you do every day, because it helps you develop these skills. Then you get these wonderful rewards, and that can transform the way you show up in the world.
So, I'm a huge fan personally of this technique. In fact, I do it all the time. I just got back from a retreat where I did it all day long, every day. So, the See Hear Feel technique can be a really wonderful go-to technique. But even if it isn't for you, it's a great place to start off so you can learn an option that helps you understand what's important in meditation—this skill development of Concentration, Clarity, and Equanimity—and one that you can do in daily life.
It gives you a clear framework for understanding these important things. It's one thing to say, "Oh, you should practice in daily life." It's another thing to give you a framework to do that. That's what the See Hear Feel technique does.
And I personally love it. I use it all the time. I use it in my seated practice, and I also use it when I'm hiking. I love it as an exercise practice. I love it when I'm doing dishes, folding laundry. So, lots of practical applications for this technique.
What's different about [this technique] is you can focus on anything, and that's part of what I actually enjoy about it. I like the variety. I like the fact that my attention is free to move and bounce from here to there. For me personally, I find it relieving not to have to constrain my attention too much.
So, one thing to watch out for with this technique is that when you start to pay attention to everything that's going on in your experience, you might discover, "Whoa, I have a lot of things going on in my experience!" And for some people, that can get overwhelming, if you're noticing a lot happening at once. Sometimes there's just a lot of activity going on in your senses, and that discovery can be surprising.
So, we have ways to make sure that that doesn't happen for you. Because it's important to have a good first experience, and the way you can do that is by understanding what the challenge might be and knowing how you can handle it if it comes up.
So, I'm going to help you understand how you can manage that experience if it comes up. And just to remember that this is a workout for your attention. So, it's a strength training exercise sometimes. And when something like that comes up, you just need to know how to manage it, so that you can continue your workout, basically. But it's good to be aware of it. If you're not aware of it, then that can throw you off. And it's good to know what you can do about it. And I'm going to help you understand how to do that.
So how do we practice this See Hear Feel technique? Well, Unified Mindfulness actually divides up your senses into three clear categories. If we can imagine that you're working out in this gym of your senses, the senses are divided into what you See, what you Hear, and what you Feel.
And you're just going to be letting your attention move freely around in that gym. And you're going to let it land, or you're going to place it, either way. But you're going to have these windows where you're paying attention for a few seconds, something like that. You're holding your attention on an experience, and you're just determining whether the experience you're noticing is in the See category, the Hear category, or the Feel category.
And you're going to use what's called a label to identify it. And the label is really simple. It's either "See" or "Hear" or "Feel." So, you have this pattern where you let your attention move around, and then it lands on something, and you hold your attention there for several seconds, and you identify it. You can say that label, either out loud or to yourself, whether it's See, or Hear, or Feel. Then you release your attention. You let it move around again, it lands again, you identify the category. And that's the strength training exercise.
And so now, one thing to know about these categories—See, Hear, Feel—is that they each cover a lot of ground.
So, See includes not just what you see in the environment, if your eyes are open and you're looking around, but also what you see in your mind. And on top of that, it's not just what we call active See, in other words, that you're noticing objects or you're noticing images in your mind, but it's also what we call restful.
And restful See could be that you've got a soft gaze—you're kind of looking through the world, not at anything in particular. Runners do this a lot. So, a restful open-eyed soft gaze, that's one possibility. Or with your eyes closed, you might just notice that there are no images going on in your mind. There's not much going on visually at all in your mind, and we'd say, “Okay, that's restful. Great. You can focus on that. And you can maybe experience that as restful.”
So, See includes what you see in your mind, what you see in the environment, whether it's active with images or you're seeing objects, or whether it's restful, soft gaze, or the blank mental screen, that's what we call it.
Hear includes a similar kind of thing—what you hear in the mind, what you hear in the world, whether you're noticing sound or silence. So, whether you're noticing mental talk in your mind or whether your mind is quiet, either way, you can still notice that and identify it as Hear and use it to strengthen your skills.
A lot of people think you have to have a quiet mind in order to do these types of practices, but actually we say, nope, it's fine. If you've got talk going on in your mind, you just identify it as Hear and you spend a few seconds paying attention to it in a specific way, which I'll explain. And all good.
So, that's the Hear category—what you hear in the mind, hear in your environment, whether it's active sound or restful silence.
And the last category is Feel, what you feel physically. And then we actually like to divide up Feel into what you feel physically and what you feel emotionally. It can be really useful to start to detect emotions in the body. It's great for emotional intelligence.
A lot of people's challenges come from emotions. So, to be aware of them can be very helpful when they come up. Sometimes people have a hard time noticing emotions in their body. But if you think about it, when you laugh, when you cry, you have strong emotions that you can notice coming up in the body. So, it follows that maybe there are more, more subtle emotions that are also coming up in the body, whether you're able to notice them or not.
If you're not clear, if you're not sure about whether a sensation is emotion, then we just say, don't worry about it. Just assume that it isn't. In order for a sensation to be emotional,
it has to be obviously emotional to you in that moment. That's what qualifies it. Just to keep things simple.
So, we have physical-type sensations and emotional-type sensations. And then we also have physical relaxation or physical neutrality. There might be places in the body where there's not much going on, not much sensation, and emotional peace. If you're not noticing emotions in the body, then that can actually be very pleasant. There's an absence of emotions that you're noticing as a kind of restfulness.
So, those are the three sense categories, and you have a general idea of how we're going to do it. So, let's dive in and do some practice. And then we'll talk about your experience afterwards, and we'll go over those skills a little bit more fully.
Okay. Let's begin.
© 2022 Unified Mindfulness LLC