Something Else to Notice

People often tell me they fell asleep during a sound bath.

Sometimes they do. I can hear the change in their breathing, and occasionally someone snores. But other times, someone will sit up afterward and tell me they were asleep for almost the entire hour, even though I hadn't noticed any of the usual signs of sleep.

I've always found this curious.

Recently, I was talking with a client about it, and he offered an explanation I hadn't considered.

Maybe, he suggested, people simply don't have the language to describe what they're experiencing.

We know what it feels like to be awake. We know what it feels like to be asleep. But there are other states of consciousness we can experience during meditation, and if we've never learned to recognize them, we might not know what to call them.

So we call them sleep.

I've been thinking about that conversation ever since.

I grew up in a conservative Christian home. The world was divided into good and evil, right and wrong. There were the people inside our home and our church, and there was everyone else.

Over time, that circle became even smaller. It wasn't enough to be Christian, or even to belong to a church. It began to seem that the people in our particular church were the ones who truly understood what was right and wrong.

I didn't think of this as a narrow way of seeing the world. It was simply the world I knew.

Eventually, I left Christianity behind. But I didn't leave that way of thinking behind with it.

I didn't even know it was there.

In college, I remember getting essays back from professors who wanted me to complicate my arguments. I'd worked hard to make them clear. I'd taken a position, supported it, and arrived at a conclusion. I couldn't understand why that wasn't enough.

What they wanted me to explore was everything that didn't fit so neatly into my argument.

At first, I found this frustrating. I thought I was being asked to make something less clear than it needed to be.

It took me a while to understand that the uncertainty was often where the interesting work began.

I've noticed something similar in the things I've spent years learning to do.

When I first started dancing, there were things I couldn't see. I could watch someone move across the floor and recognize that they were dancing beautifully, but I couldn't have told you much about why.

Years later, I can watch the same movement and notice a dozen things happening at once. The timing of a weight transfer. The way one partner responds to the other. A tiny adjustment that changes the quality of an entire movement.

None of those things appeared because I learned to dance.

They were there all along.

Lately, I've been experiencing this again with music.

I've returned to studying and making music with more intensity than ever before. And as I go deeper, I'm finding myself hearing things I hadn't noticed before. A chord that changes the feeling of a melody. A rhythm that seems simple until I try to play it. The care someone has taken with a detail that might last only a moment.

Sometimes I'll return to a piece of music I've known for years and hear something that feels entirely new.

I wonder how many times I've listened to it without hearing that particular thing.

And I wonder what I'll hear a year from now that I can't hear today.

There's something strange about discovering how much you've been missing. Especially when, before the discovery, you had no sense that anything was missing at all.

I think about those essays I wrote in college. How certain I was that I'd made my arguments as clear as possible. How confused I was when someone asked me to look more closely.

And I think about the people who sit up after a sound bath, convinced they've been asleep.

Maybe some of them have.

Maybe others have been somewhere they don't yet have a name for.

The next time someone tells me they slept through the entire hour, I probably won't correct them.

After all, I was the one who needed someone else to suggest there might be something else to notice.