Meditation: what to do when sound is painful

Even if the sound is painful, that irritation can be transformed into meditative practice. On an early morning trail run, I felt my body tense as I heard the slosh, slosh, slosh of ice in a fellow runner’s hydration vest. Every slosh sent ripples of unpleasant sensations flooding through my body. I tightened and my brain began to judge. “Why hadn’t she burped the bladder so it wouldn’t slosh?”

I have misophonia, an intermittent phobia triggered by repetitive sounds. Some days that sound wouldn’t bother me at all. On another day, overwhelmed by unpleasant body sensations, I would fall back and let her get ahead, out of earshot.

But that morning, I decided to use the experience as practice. She’s a friend, relatively new to running. It was an opportunity.

I relaxed my body and mind and let the slosh, slosh, slosh flood through me. It still rattled me, but it became a challenge to hear every bit of it. I laser-focused and opened to it, examining it with the microscope of awareness.

No longer resisting, I allowed the sound to pass through me. Zen calls this “Becoming the sound.” Interesting and less painful, the miles rolled by.

I have included more than twenty “Your Turn” exercises in the book Make Every Move a Meditation.