Welcome to the Forest of Eight Senses.
This is a guided sensory journey aimed at neurodivergent people.
Before we walk.
Some things that belong to you,
Not to me.
You can keep your eyes open or closed,
Or resting in one spot.
Nothing here needs your eyes shut.
You can move,
Rock,
Sway,
Bounce a knee or pace the route.
If you have something in your hands.
Stimming is not a distraction from this.
It's a way of listening to your body.
Which is the whole of what we are doing.
I will not ask you to control your breathing.
Some people see pictures in their minds.
Some never have.
If you do not see images,
You can know the forest instead.
As words,
As facts,
As somewhere you have been.
Knowing works as well as seeing.
You can stop,
Drift,
Skip a section,
Or rejoin later.
None of that is failing.
When you are ready.
We approached the edge of the woods.
Chapter 1.
The Edge.
Where the open ground stops,
The trees begin.
You are standing on that line.
In front of you,
A narrow track curves out of sight between the trunks.
You do not have to go in yet.
Standing at the threshold is allowed.
The forest asks nothing of you.
Trees do not have expectations.
When you are ready and you want to.
Step into the forest.
Chapter 2 The Seeing Sense Inside,
The light comes down through the canopy in pieces.
Small bright coins of it.
Moving as the leaves shift.
Everything else is green.
And grow.
And cool.
Look at one thing only.
A single phone.
A patch of moss.
A root that has broken out of the soil and gone back down again.
If your attention slides onto something else,
Follow it.
Attention that moves is not broken attention.
If you are not seeing pictures,
Hold what is true instead.
Broken light.
Green and brown.
Dimmer than outside.
That is enough.
The sound here is layered.
Far off,
A bird calling twice and stopping.
Nearer.
Wind working through high leaves.
Nearest of all,
Small movements in the leaf litter.
This is chapter three.
Sound.
Near and far.
You may only hold one layer at a time.
That is how hearing often works.
Pick one and stay with it.
If sound is a lot for you.
If it is always a lot.
You don't have to open up to it here.
If you want a quieter forest.
Leatherwing Drop.
This is your forest.
Chapter 4 touch,
Skin and bones.
The air is cooler in here.
Damp.
Moving slightly against your face and the backs of your hands.
There is a tree beside the path.
The bark has ridges deep enough to fit a fingertip into.
Flakes that come away.
And moss in the hollows that give under pressure.
In the room,
You can do this for real.
Press a palm against the chair.
Or the floor.
Or you're on me.
Push and feel the push come back.
If there is a texture you dislike,
It is not in this forest.
Take it out.
Again.
This is your forest.
And now we move to chapter 5,
Smell.
The ground opening.
The smell of woodland comes from underneath.
Leaves that fell two autumns ago and have been quietly becoming a part of the floor you walk on.
What up?
And something faintly sharp beneath it.
Smell arrives without permission and goes straight to memory.
If this has taken you somewhere else.
Go there for a moment.
That is not a detour.
You are still on your journey.
This is the journey.
The path drops to a stream narrow enough to step over,
Running clear across the pale stones.
Put your fingers in and the cold travels up your arm faster than you expect.
We move into chapter 6.
Taste the small stream.
Taste is the sense we leave out,
Because there is nothing in your mouth.
But there is always something.
Let your tongue rest where it sits and notice what is already there.
You are checking whether the sense is switched on.
Not grading the flavour.
Chapter 7,
Proprioception.
At clearing.
The trees thin and you come into a clearing.
Rooms are spread out and the sky is properly visible for the first time.
This part is about where your body is.
Not how it feels,
But where it actually is.
Without looking.
You know where your hands are.
Do you know where your feet are?
How far away?
Which way your knees point.
Nobody told you?
There is a sense running under all the others whose only job is to know where you end.
If that signal is vague or far off,
And for many of us it is.
Turn the volume up.
Press your feet into the floor.
Squeeze your hands open and closed.
Stretch an arm out as far as it goes.
And now bring it back.
If you've been rocking or pacing this whole time,
You were already doing all of this.
That is the sense working.
And,
As we continue our journey,
We enter Chapter 8.
Balance.
The tilt of things.
Stay in the clearing.
Wind is moving across the tops of the trees.
Watch the canopy lean one way.
And then come back.
Trees are built for this.
You have a sense for that too.
It sits in the inner ear and tracks tilt.
Turn.
Rise and fall.
This is how you know which way is up.
If you want to.
Move with the trees.
Rock forwards and back or side to side.
Turn your head slowly one way,
Then the other.
Small is fine.
And so is Big.
If this makes you feel unsteady,
Be still instead.
Stillness is also information for that sense.
And if rocking is something you already do.
.
.
Something you may have been told not to do.
This is where I tell you plainly.
That that movement is good.
That movement is part of your regulation.
And your body works.
It worked out long before anyone offered you a technique.
Chapter 9 Interception the roots.
At the far side of the clearing stands an old tree.
Whose roots have grown up into a kind of seed.
Sit there,
Or lie among them.
Or perhaps stand nearby.
This last sense faces inwards.
It reports on the inside of you.
Are you hungry?
Thirsty?
Hot.
Cold.
Tired,
Tense,
Or settled.
For many neurodivergent people.
This sense is quiet or garbled,
Or arrives late and all at once.
Or perhaps the language we've been given to describe it doesn't match our experience of it.
If yours does this,
There's nothing here to fix.
Your neurodivergent interception is working just as it should.
So this is not a test.
Ask one gentle question.
And accept whatever arrives,
Including nothing.
Am I warm or cool?
Is there tension anywhere?
My jaw,
Shoulders,
Hands,
Stomach.
Is there something my body has been trying to tell me that I've been too busy to hear?
If nothing came.
That is a real result and not a blank.
You asked that question,
And that still counts.
Chapter 10.
All eight at once.
Notice how much has been arriving the whole time you are attending to one thing.
Light in pieces,
Wind in the canopy of the forest.
Kula Wataaf.
Your hands where you left them.
And the quiet weather of the inside of you.
8 streams,
Running at once.
All the time.
Some of us receive them louder than most people do,
Some quieter.
There is no fault in the equipment.
It is a lot of information being honestly reported.
And as we come towards the end of our journey,
We enter into chapter 11,
The Walk Back.
We go back the way you came.
Across the clearing.
Up the slope.
Over the stream and past the tree with moss in its ridges.
Along the narrow path.
Take one thing with you.
Coins of life.
The cold of the water.
The smell of the earth.
Your feet pressing down.
Pick one now and keep it.
This is a gift from your forest.
A forest that you can return to at any time.
The path curves,
And there is the edge of the forest again.
With the open ground beyond.
We come out of the woods now.
Not suddenly.
But when we are ready.
Come back into the room in your own time.
No rush and no queue to wait for.
You might move your fingers.
Stretch.
Make a sound.
Stand up and pace.
Or stay exactly as you are.
The eight senses are still running.
They were running before we started.
And they'll keep going after we stop.
All we did.
Was turned towards them for a while.
Thank you for walking with me through the forest and experiencing what it is to be you.
And I will see you on the next journey.
