"i thank you god for most this amazing
day: for the leaping greenly spirits of trees
and a blue true dream of sky; and for everything
which is natural which is infinite which is yes
(i who have died am alive again today,
and this is the sun's birthday; this is the birthday
of life and of love and wings: and of the gay
great happening illimitable earth)
how should tasting touching hearing seeing
breathing any - lifted from the no
of all nothing - human merely being
doubt unimaginable You?
(now the ears of my ears awake and
now the eyes of my eyes are opened)"
-e.e.cummings
-Selected Poems, 1994
As suggested in this e. e .cummings poem, it is through sensation that we awaken to life. Through our senses we experience ourselves as living beings resonant with the pulse of activity within ourselves and in the world around us. Sensual embodiment is the capacity for receiving and responding to this aliveness – the excitement, information and stimulation available through our senses and our inner felt sense.
It is through sensual embodiment that we interact with our environment, registering pleasure or pain, empathy or revulsion, delight or fear. The perception of inner felt sense enables us to recognize our state of being, attend to our basic needs, assess whether we are in balance or out of balance in our physiology. Through still subtler levels of embodiment, we are able to identify the nuances of emotion, to interpret and act on an inner impulse, apprehend our connections with our environment on an energetic level – come into communion and resonance with it.
“The senses are complementary powers evolved in complex interdependence with one another. Each sense is a unique modality of this body’s existence, yet in the activity of perception these divergent modalities necessarily intercommunicate and overlap. It is thus that a raven soaring in the distance is not, for me, a mere visual image; as I follow it with my eyes, I inevitably feel the stretch and flex of its wings with my own muscles, and its sudden swoop toward the nearby trees is a visceral as well as a visual experience for me…..My various senses, diverging as they do from a single, coherent body, coherently converge, as well, in the perceived thing, just as the separate perspectives of my two eyes converge upon the raven and convene there into a single focus. My senses connect up with each other in the things I perceive, or rather each perceived thing gathers my senses together in a coherent manner and it is this that enables me to experience the thing itself as a center of forces, as another nexus of experience, as an Other”
- David Abram
- The Spell of the Sensuous, p 61
Our propensity for thought, evaluating, comparing, interpreting and judging removes us from our direct experience, sets us apart from our living nature. To come to know the life of our bodies and the world around us directly requires a discipline, a habit of attention in which we bypass thought and our inner mental chatter to open to, perceive, be nurtured and come into relationship through our senses.
Here are some practices to consider in engaging the present through sensual embodiment –
Opening to life through your senses:
Go to a place in nature where you find yourself enlivened or nurtured. Spend at least an hour taking in the experience through your senses – touching, tasting, smelling, hearing, seeing and opening the perceptive ability of your heart along with your other senses to enter into relationship with your environment. Notice how your body responds to the stimuli – pleasure, delight, joy, inspiration, etc…let yourself register the delight, take it in, just BE and connect to the living nature of your being through your experience.
At the end of your time of exploration through the senses, take 15 minutes to do an automatic writing exercise, writing from your bodily experience. Note what meanings if any have been communicated to you and through your sensual embodiment.
Tuning in to your inner impulse:
Give yourself a date for at least a two hour period of time (though a half day is even better!) in which you spontaneously allow the ‘soft animal of your body’ (from Mary Oliver's poem 'Wild Geese') to inform you about what it wants and to guide the agenda for how you spend your time. It is important that you not plan your activities for this time in advance; rather, the opportunity is to ‘listen in’ to your sensing and feeling self to inform your choices and actions in the moment. This might be a single activity or a series of activities that unfold one from the other as you continue to sense in to ‘what’s next?’ Be fully present in and savor each experience you choose. Let your body tell you what is enough time for one activity or another. Keep tuning in to note your satisfaction, contentment or the impulse to complete and move to something else.
Let this be a solo experience for yourself, so that there is nothing else influencing the agenda for this time. Afterwards, reflect on what this experience was like. How easy was it for you to access through your sensing self what you wanted to do? What was the quality of your experience when guided by your sensing self? What would it take to integrate more of this way of paying attention to yourself into your daily life?
