Sit comfortably. Soft eyes, or closed if you prefer. We are going to do an exercise that has been around in different forms for centuries, and that ACT calls connecting with the observing self.
Notice the ringing. Notice your breath. Notice the weight of your body. Now notice this: there is something doing the noticing. That something is you. Not your body, exactly, and not your thoughts. The you that is awake right now, observing all of this. The witness.
Try this image. You are the sky. Vast, open, with depth you cannot see the bottom of. And inside that sky, weather is happening. There are clouds. Some are dark and heavy, full of storm. Some are light and quick. Some sit in the middle of the sky for an entire afternoon. The tinnitus is one of those clouds. A persistent one. But it is a cloud.
Now check something. If the tinnitus is a cloud, is it you? Has it become the sky? It has not. The sky does not become the cloud, even when the cloud is huge. The sky holds the cloud, and the sky carries on being the sky.
You have had a thousand clouds pass through this sky. The cloud of being seven years old in the back garden. The cloud of your first day of school. The cloud of your worst week last year. The cloud of yesterday afternoon. The cloud, right now, of this tinnitus. Each one came, and then each one moved on, or will move on. The sky was here before any of them. The sky will be here after.
You are not your tinnitus. You are not your thoughts about your tinnitus. You are not your suffering. You are the place where all of this is happening. The witness. The sky.
Sit with that for a moment. There is no other instruction. Just be the sky, while the weather is what it is.
When you are ready, soften the image and come back to the room. Carry the sky with you.