gosh that sounds quite hard, especially finding the silence to embrace. i have on occasion used hypnosis at home to turn down the volume, but I cant do it every time I try, plus it always goes back up the next day.
I cant imagine sitting for an hour though. how do you embrace the silence when there is ambient noise
I mean -- there's
always ambient noise. You can go to some ancient monastery way out in the hills, and it'll seem dead silent, but if you sit there and start doing the mindfulness practice, you'll become aware of environmental sounds, etc. If someone goes and sits in a completely soundproof chamber and does the same thing, even if they do not have tinnitus, after a while they will start perceiving various high-pitched noises, because such are always present in the nervous system (this has been demonstrated in several studies).
I think tinnitus for a lot of people represents some broken machinery in the various processors and filters in the brain -- so what would usually be a nearly inaudible signal becomes clearly audible. The devil of it is, once you start noticing it, you're subconsciously programming your mind to pick up on that signal (I think this is why many people including myself note an actual volume spike in terms of MML during times of acute stress -- stress hormones increase perceptual processing across the board, and the same heightened senses that make it easier to see a bear moving in the underbrush, also make it easier to perceive tinnitus -- then you focus on it even
more, and the feedback loop just goes bonkers, making it louder and louder, and over a period of time this causes increased cortical connectivity).
This is why I don't find it particularly surprising to be hear reading a thread where someone says that contemplative practices over a really extended period have reduced their perception of T: all of this plasticity and rewiring is happening every moment all day, no matter what you do -- it's just a question of whether you're pushing things in the "right" direction or the "wrong" one. I'm using quotes there because it's obvious that anyone who is distressed by tinnitus would think that having things get quieter is moving things in a correct direction, but from the point of view of the brain as a signal processor, there is no morality to it, it's just a question of what signals are being amplified vs suppressed.
I don't think meditation did anything useful for me until I learned how to distance myself from judgement, even for very very short periods of time. If you're sitting there thinking "ahh, my tinnitus is awful and oppressive and I hate it" for hours at a time, day after day, you're not doing yourself any favors.
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