Sound vs Noise in the Treatment Room
I love this video of Zen master Sunryu Suzuki Roshi explaining the difference between Sound and Noise. I love his cheeky smile and the way he just radiates joy (even in black and white). I’m no Zen master or maybe I’m so Zen I only have a sketchy idea of what Zen is & I can be with that. However, his teaching here reminds me of a shift I’ve noticed in myself in my practice over the last two years.
London is not a calm or peaceful city. It can be downright noisy. I ran a clinic for a year in a beautiful, tranquil, herbal medicine shop that happened to have a perpetual construction zone next door. It was not uncommon for sessions to be interrupted by vibrations of jack hammers, grinding of drills and all manner of constructive implements of torture. On a good day I could get through my morning sessions without much interruption. But on a bad day the noise, and it was definitely noise, could drown out even the most dynamic of stillnesses.
At first, this worried me. What if the clients were disturbed? What if the noise wouldn’t stop? What if the clients didn’t come back? Should I apologise about the noise? Should I pretend it didn’t exist? Should I hold my clients in such a deeply, anchored stillness that no one would notice that the building on the other side of the wall was being slowly dismantled brick by brick by brick?
Needless to say, this was stressful. This meant I went into each session with an edge, a worry. There was already a thought of “Oh God…what if…”
I worked around it. I battled it. I struggled with it. For a year. Unfortunately the shop closed and I moved my clinic elsewhere. Unfortunate because the shop was, despite the noise, a wonderful place to be but also because my attitude towards noise has gradually shifted over the last year and it would have been good to experience this shift in that environment.
Singing with the bird
In the video above, Shunryu Suzuki explains how when you hear a bird singing you think there is a bird singing over there but for buddhists when they hear the bird, “bird is me…I actually am not listening to the bird. Bird is here in my mind already and I am singing with the bird.”
Nowadays in sessions when a noise from outside interrupts whether it’s the roaring of an airplane over head, a passing ambulance or a cat mewing outside I see it more as an opportunity to expand our awareness (the client’s and my own) out into the wider field. It’s almost as if the natural world outside is tapping on the door saying, “Pardon me, I’m a part of this too.” This can be a great window to working in the long tide. I will sometimes verbally acknowledge an emerging sound just by saying simply, “There is a loud motorcycle outside. Just include this sound allowing your awareness to expand out from your body into the room out into the street outside, as far as the horizon if you can.” I also like to use humour, “There is a cat crying outside the window. This is just nature reminding us that it’s still there.” (something we lose site of in London)
I believe Michael Shea addresses this issue when he talks about Attunement. I like the definition of attunement: To bring into a harmonious or responsive relationship. For Michael Shea it is one of the basic points of biodynamic practice – a way of establishing safety – and is the rhythmic slow movement of attention towards and away from the client. This is the ‘key to the rehabilitation of the client’s nervous system’ or to bringing the client into a harmonious and responsive ‘right relationship’.
What I have found is that the simple act of not trying to control noisy interruptions makes my treatment room more quiet. Singing with the bird. Crying with cat. Roaring with the motorcycle. Have you ever noticed that when clients come in upset, worked up about something, or angry then suddenly the space outside the treatment room is full of the noise of sirens, engines, doors slamming, people shouting? I believe this is the natural world saying, ‘slow down and listen.’ Or in more familiar craniosacral parlance, ‘Be Still And Know.’
