This meditation technique always boosts my mood
Take a moment to look up from your phone or laptop. What can you see in the space around you?
Choose one object in your visual field, and really see it. Now notice any sounds you can hear. And now any sensations you can feel in your body. Spend a few seconds focusing on each one.
Just like that, our senses bring us into contact with the present moment.
Meditation teacher and neuroscience researcher Shinzen Young has a technique he calls See Hear Feel, which uses the technique of mental noting to focus on visual objects, sounds, and body sensations, as well as inner imagery, inner ‘talk’, and ‘feelings’ or emotional body sensations.
You can do this meditation with eyes open or closed, sitting, standing, walking, or lying down—pretty much any time you want.
In each moment, simply notice what is most prominent in your awareness. Say one of the three verbal labels (“see,” “hear,” or “feel”) either mentally or out loud, then zoom in and focus on that image, sound, or sensation for a moment in order to really make contact with it.
You can note at a pace that’s comfortable for you, typically once every few seconds. So your inner monologue while doing this technique might sound something like, “see, hear, hear, see, feel, feel…” and so on.
If you haven’t used mental noting before, it can take a little bit to get used to. It’s a technique that originally comes from vipassana meditation, and some people find it very helpful, especially because it gives the verbal part of the mind something to do during meditation.
Personally, I like practicing See Hear Feel when I’m walking around outside. I’ll note the sound of passing cars or birds, the feeling of sunlight on my face, the sight of flowers on the side of the road. Even under very mundane circumstances, doing this practice always seems to boost my mood.
Beyond that, the deeper purpose of this practice is to build sensory clarity, concentration power, and equanimity, which together make up Shinzen’s definition of mindfulness.
Here’s a recording of Shinzen guiding See Hear Feel on Insight Timer (free).
And you can learn more about Shinzen’s Unified Mindfulness approach here.
If you give this practice a shot, leave a comment below to let me know how it went. I hope you find it as enjoyable as I have.
That’s all for this week! As always, I appreciate your feedback on Mindful Mondays. Please feel free to reply to this email or leave a comment on Substack to let me know what you thought.
Thanks for reading,
Chris Cordry, LMFT
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I do a similar practice, especially when I'm feeling disembodied recently. love the "see, hear, feel" framing – so often we forget that the reason we're gritting our teeth at our desk is because we forgetting to connect with our bodies
Thanks Chris. I played with this just now as you instructed, and the shift is palpable. The noting opens an invitation to an inner observer, creating some distance from the experience. It's interesting to me that greater mindfulness can be accessed by changing the aperture of our attention. Focusing in is one effective way to interrupt the attention pattern than leaves us unaware, and I've also used a more diffuse, or the practice of "field attention" - opening awareness to the field surrounding the object of my attention for a similar benefit of becoming more cognizant of the present. Someone who taught me a version of this years ago called it "wide vision." Practiced by looking something, but at the same time, noticing everything that is the full periphery of your attention even while tending to the object in the center.