Humming And Escaping From the Rearbrain
I had free time, blessed free time, and I wanted to know what to do with it. And my cognition, my awareness was stuck. It was jammed in the back and back sides of my skull.
I knew that I was not going to get anything done until I dealt with that. I couldn’t — I had no free awareness.
A friend of mine stopped by and suggested humming. Oh yes, what in India is called “the practice of the bee.” We had learned it together from a Buddhist teacher. I was grateful. I had forgotten it.
So I started humming.
It began with a closed-mouth hum, the sort one might do around company.
Though it started in my throat. it quickly moved to the place where my cognition was stuck — the back and sides of my skull.
Then, as humming will do, it spilled over a bit. You know how you can hear when someone hums near you? It spills over into you? Well, within me it also spilled over into the bones and tissue around the congested place — my neck, the larger skull bones, my sinuses, the neck bones. It wasn’t intrusive. I could stop the spillage by stopping humming, I could slow it by reducing the intensity of the hum. It was an experience I was in control of.
As it became clear I was in control, I could relax a bit. It was OK that the hum was spreading out in my head. A few moments later I realized:
My consciousness was no longer sequestered in that tiny part of my skull where it started.
Now it had spread. The barriers that had kept it there — the walls of bone and tight tissue — had become the medium through which the vibration of the hum moved further out.
The hum had relaxed me a bit, and it began to make forays. It went down my spine past my heart. Not into it — the heart is such a citadel — but near it.
It spread out into both the muscle and the bones of my shoulder girdle. The peripatetic hum was bringing ease wherever it went. I froze, and it withdrew. I granted it permission again and it came forth from the place in my skull whence it had first issued. That tight place had become a nest the hum could return to and come out from again.
Now it was further down my spine, into lumbar vertebrae. Ah, those lower back injuries from my days as a stagehand were mmm not revived, but greeted. It was friendly.
At some point in a hum you need to stop for breath. Oh look — I am taking relatively short breaths in, and with the hum I am doing long slow exhales. That is the recipe for relaxation, isn’t it? for “parasympathetic activation.” Sneaky but good.
The hum was in many places.
It was not everywhere in my body, but it was in my skull, and my shoulders, and in my spine’s many abidings. It was distributed. I knew that as I allowed it to, the hum would move to any part of my body.
I also knew that if I didn’t want it to go to a certain spot, it would stand away from that place. And that courtesy and that trustworthiness meant that many closed doors cautiously opened to it and the hum visited. My pelvis came to know it, my ribcage, my femurs and my aging knees.
And “I” was simultaneously in all of those places.
Awareness had traveled with the hum on each of its visits. As I grew used to having the sound spread through my body, I found that my awareness was in all the places where the hum was — at once.
The humming had become a way to experience my body as a unity. The imprisonment of my awareness in the back of my skull had been replaced by a distributed consciousness.
I think this is called Embodied Awareness.
My friend’s visit had reminded me of teachings we had both taken from a Somatic Buddhist named Julie Henderson. Julie suggests that you learn to rest down into that awareness, until you feel that you are that of which you are being aware as you hum. It is not just being outside and watching what is happening, but being there and being what is happening.
She wrote about humming in a small work called The Hum Book. It is not available in the US now that I know of. It has been republished in a German-English bilingual edition in Germany as Das Buch vom Summen: The Hum Book which I found on ABEBook.com. It costs $34, including shipping from Germany to the US. Expensive, and worth it.
