Leaning in to what we can’t control
I've been hearing the hum for the past few weeks — day and night. I'm in the southwest of England, though probably not close enough to Bristol to call it the “Bristol Hum.”
At first I became very focused on trying to identify the source. I went down a lot of the same rabbit holes many people here have explored already: infrastructure, pipelines, electrical systems, low-frequency noise, psychoacoustics, geology, and so on. But after a while I realised that a huge amount of energy can get spent trying to eliminate or solve the hum externally, while much less attention gets given to how we are relating to the experience internally.
I've been meditating for a few years, so I started wondering whether meditation practice might offer another way of working with this.
One idea I found really helpful comes from meditation teacher Shinzen Young:
> “Suffering = Pain × Resistance.”
Applied here, you could say:
> “Suffering = Noise × Resistance.”
What I mean is this: while there may genuinely be an external sound or vibration, a lot of the distress we experience may come from the body's resistance to it — the tension, vigilance, frustration, fear, and the thoughts that arise around it:
“This is being done to me.”
“I can't escape this.”
“This will never stop.”
“I'm trapped.”
Meditation traditions often suggest something very counterintuitive with unpleasant sensations: instead of trying to block them out or get rid of them, we move closer to them. We investigate them directly.
So rather than focusing on the story about the hum, I started experimenting with just feeling the raw sensation itself.
Not the thought about it.
Not the fear about it.
Not the anticipation of it.
Just the direct experience.
And something interesting happens when you do that carefully.
The “hum” as a direct sensory experience is often much more neutral than the layers of resistance wrapped around it. Intense maybe, strange maybe — but not inherently unbearable.
Another thing I noticed is that one of the defining qualities of the hum is how ambiguous it feels. It seems both internal and external at the same time — half perceived and half imagined.
As William Wordsworth wrote:
> “...we half perceive,
> And half create...”
Not because the hum is unreal, but because all perception is participatory. Modern neuroscience and perceptual psychology already point in this direction. We never directly experience the external world itself. There are vibrations, waveforms, nerve impulses — and then the brain constructs what we experience as sound, sight, touch, and so on.
In that sense, every sound is psychoacoustic.
So while there may absolutely be something external triggering the hum, the actual experienced sound only exists as an experience in consciousness.
That changed my relationship to it.
Instead of feeling like there was an alien thing “invading” me, I started noticing that what I was actually experiencing was a phenomenon arising within awareness itself.
Again, I'm not saying people are making this up. Quite the opposite. I'm saying perception is always participatory. The sound is real as experience.
So I wanted to offer two experiments that some people here might find useful:
- Instead of resisting the hum for 5–10 minutes, try allowing it completely. Notice the bodily tension, emotions, thoughts, irritation, fear, etc. Don't try to change any of it. Just observe.
- Try noticing that the sound itself is occurring in consciousness — that your experience of the hum is inseparable from the awareness perceiving it.
Not as a belief system. Just as an experiment in perception.
I'd genuinely be interested if anyone tries this and notices any shift in their relationship to the hum, even if the sound itself doesn't change.