3.2 Defining Self in Listening to the SONG of Life

This selective review of the literature on “self” reveals that the self includes at least all of the following:

• • Physical body and senses
  • Emotions, affect, feelings
  • Mental or cognitive components
  • Spiritual, purpose, higher self, one mind
  • Attention and awareness, the void-space-emptiness
  • Consciousness, subconscious-unconscious, and supraconscious
  • Ego, ethno, world, and Kosmo centric levels

To listen to the self in the SONG of life, the role of attention, awareness, and consciousness is the primary vehicle for listening to the contents of the self (and all the other SONG contexts). The hub of the Siegel’s Wheel of Awareness^[1] is the closest approximation of what I mean by the capacity of “self” to know itself as body, mind, emotions, and spirit and recursively turn its attention upon itself to explore awareness or consciousness.

Using this definition of self in the SONG of life, I explore two additional methods to cultivate listening to the self. The first method describes three types of journaling: neurocycling, short-term journaling, and comprehensive journaling. The second method I develop is an extended autoethnographic account of how I teach meditation as listening to self in the classroom. I use this type of classroom meditation to encourage students to develop their capacities to listen deeply to the self in the SONG of life.