Sensing The Unseen: Unlock 6th Sense-Like Awareness Of Body

This talk discusses what is possible when we get out of our heads and are able to be fully aware of our whole body.

Topics covered about mindfulness of the body: Ways you may already have some awareness. An exercise in feeling into feelings of aliveness. What if you feel nothing? Why breath is a common tool for body awareness but not for everyone. Different options for body position in meditation. How to deal with restlessness. What to do with pain/discomfort and Why it's beneficial to stay with these often uncomfortable experiences.

Transcript

Welcome to this talk about mindfulness of the body or awareness of the body.

To give you an idea of what is possible,

I want to start with this excerpt from a book titled Do You Belong?

A Call for Connection by Sebeni Selassie.

We have the capacity to be aware of so much more than the limited ways we've trained our mental awareness.

Some years ago,

I heard an on-being episode on NPR with acoustic biologist Katie Payne.

First of all,

That may be the coolest job title ever.

Payne is a trained listener.

In the 1960s,

She was on a team of biologists that first discovered that humpback whales communicate by sound.

More recently,

She asked for permission to sit in the Seattle Zoo for a week and listen to the elephants.

After a few days,

She noticed that she was quote,

Feeling over and over again,

A throbbing in the air,

A change of pressure in her ears that would occur when she was near the elephant cages,

But not when she was in other parts of the zoo.

End quote.

She realized there was a whole other level of communication that was happening below human frequencies,

Below the pitches of sound people can hear.

She described the air as thrilling,

Shuddering,

Or throbbing.

Imagine.

She was feeling a sound vibration that no one else really paid attention to,

And that unlocked for Western science a whole other level of communication for elephants.

I'm sure the indigenous people have been aware of this elephant frequency and whale songs for millennia,

But what about us?

Us poor disembodied moderns,

Stuck in our heads.

What are we not paying attention to?

What frequencies are we not sensing?

And can we meet our lives with our whole bodies?

What can we hear when we really listen?

In this excerpt from this book,

Ms.

Selassie is a really profound example of what it is like to not just live in your head,

But being so aware of the experiences you're having within your body that you become almost like ESP.

It's almost outside of what we think of as sensory perception.

So much of our days are spent thinking,

Planning,

Discussing,

Communicating so much in our head and not in our bodies.

Just quick bullet point of the topics to be covered today.

The ways you may already be mindful and aware of your body.

What to do if you feel nothing.

Why breath is common,

But maybe not the best way to get in touch with your body for everyone.

Different positions you can be in for meditation.

How to deal with pain,

Discomfort,

And restlessness while meditating.

And why practicing with discomfort and pain can be beneficial in the long run.

So some really obvious ways you might already have awareness of your body is the so-called five senses.

Sound,

Sight,

Smell,

Touch,

Taste.

These are some pretty obvious,

Maybe,

Ways you're in touch with your body.

I mean,

You've probably eaten a food or smelled a smell.

So those are familiar.

But underneath the obvious level,

There's this whole awareness of sensations happening inside the body.

So if you'd like to do this little exercise with me,

Start shaking your hands.

Just shake,

Shake,

Shake,

Shake,

Shake.

Shake,

Shake,

Shake,

Shake,

Shake.

And then reach your arms up overhead as much as as comfortable as you continue to shake and shake and shake.

Faster,

Faster,

Maybe.

And then if you'd like to close your eyes or soften your gaze,

You might do that as you stop as you stop the shaking.

And see how slowly you can lower your hands into your lap if you're seated or by your sides if you're laying down.

As you lower,

What sensations do you feel inside of the hands?

Is there throbbing,

Pulsing,

Tingling?

What is happening inside?

What are the sensations of aliveness inside your hands?

And then just let your hands land.

And if you want to blink the eyes back open,

You might do that.

So that's one little window into becoming more and more in our bodies,

More awake.

More and more in our bodies,

More aware,

More present.

One thing that comes up for a lot of people when they start meditating is either they become extremely aware of all this living experience inside their bodies or they notice a lack of sensation.

They feel nothing or numbness or emptiness.

So if that's you,

First of all,

That's fine.

You've been taught by society to live in your brain and that only your thoughts and what your brain produces matter.

So first of all,

Totally fine,

Totally normal.

And then what you can do when you're trying to direct your awareness to your body sensations is either ignore the instructions and go somewhere where you are having sensation or if you're comfortable with it,

Feel into that lack.

Feel into the emptiness or space where you think there should be feelings.

And of course I'm putting should in quotes because you shouldn't be should or shouldn't.

So having a lack of feeling or feeling nothing is totally fine.

Another way that's really common to get into body,

Feeling your body,

Is breath.

Breath is such a common meditation.

Meditating on either sensations of where you feel the breath or meditating like you're riding a wave of inhale,

Exhale.

This can be great for a lot of people.

Some people find the breath really triggering,

Really freaks them out when they start paying attention to their breath.

Or some people get really controlling about their breath.

And I'm not saying any of those things are wrong and you could absolutely meditate on that experience.

But also maybe breath is just not a great anchor for you.

Maybe breath is not a good thing for you to focus on if it distracts you from being present.

But breath is one of the most commonly used methods of mindfulness of the body.

So don't be surprised if you find that everywhere.

Another issue with the body that comes up a lot with meditation is aches,

Pains,

Restlessness,

Discomfort.

So first of all you might reconsider what position you meditate in.

If you feel like you have to sit down on a cushion or whatever and meditate,

Maybe that's an issue and it just doesn't work for you.

You can try standing instead or laying,

Laying on your back,

Laying on one side,

Laying on the other side,

Laying on your belly,

Or any other position where you feel like you can really bring awareness in and turn in.

You can also play with having eyes closed or open.

Some people might find that by having some light coming in,

Having some unfocused visual stimulation can help them tune in.

So for you,

If you're one of those people,

You might stare at the empty space between you and the thing that's in front of you,

Whatever happens to be out in front of you.

And then restlessness,

Oh boy,

You sit for a minute and all of a sudden you got a shift.

You get this urge to want to move,

Either shift your weight or change position or get up.

When this comes up,

It's really an interesting opportunity.

I hate this.

I hate this.

It's a really interesting opportunity to sit with the urge to move or sit with the urge to want to do something.

What does that urge feel like?

Can you stay with just the urge?

See if it changes,

See if it stays the same.

Does it get stronger,

Weaker?

Maybe it goes away.

Maybe not.

Pain,

On the other hand,

Can make meditation a living hell.

Pain and discomfort.

You kind of have to decide for yourself where the line between a discomfort that you're willing to sit with and experience versus a pain that needs movement or a change of position.

So I would say start by getting curious about the discomfort.

And I think pain is a really broad and unhelpful term to describe the experience that most people have when they're in pain.

And instead,

I like to break pain down into its sensations.

Is this burning?

Is this searing?

Is this twisting?

Is this a sharp stab?

Is it an ache?

And really pick apart the pain into its actual sensations.

And all of these restlessness,

Lack of feeling,

Pain,

Discomfort,

All of those need to be approached with even more care and even more tenderness.

Having a real compassion for yourself when you're experiencing those things so that you're not sitting with it as punishment that,

Oh,

I have to sit with this because that's my duty.

But you're like,

Can I hold myself while I experience this?

A quote from one of my mentors,

Jack Cornfield,

About why you might want to sit with your discomfort.

You can move now,

But there may be a time in the future where you won't be able to.

Or you'll be with someone in pain,

And you won't be able to be there and be open-hearted and okay with someone else's pain.

We spend our days doing things to avoid discomfort or pain,

But it's a fact of life,

And there's nothing wrong with experiencing it.

So thanks,

Jack,

For that.

So I'll close this short talk out by sharing this poem by John Rodell.

My brain and my heart divorced a decade ago over who was to blame about how big of a mess I have become.

Eventually,

They couldn't be in the same room with each other.

Now my head and my heart share custody of me.

I stay with my brain during the week,

And my heart gets me on weekends.

They never speak to one another.

Instead,

They give me the same notes to pass to each other each week,

And their notes they send to each other always have the same thing in them.

This is all your fault.

On Sundays,

My heart complains about how my head has let me down in the past,

And on Wednesdays,

My head lists all the times my heart has screwed things up for us in the future.

They blame each other for the state of my life.

There's been a lot of yelling and a lot of crying.

So lately,

I've been spending a lot of time with my gut,

Who serves as my unofficial therapist.

Most nights,

I sneak out the window in my rib cage Most nights,

I sneak out the window in my rib cage and slide down my spine and collapse on my gut's plush leather chair that's always open for me,

And I just sit,

Sit,

Sit,

Sit until the sun comes up.

Last evening,

My gut asked me if I was having a hard time being caught between my heart and my head.

I nodded.

I said I didn't know if I could live with either of them anymore.

My heart is always sad about something that happened yesterday,

While my head is always worried that something may happen tomorrow,

I lamented.

My gut squeezed my hand.

I just can't live with my mistakes of the past or my anxiety about the future,

I sighed.

My gut smiled and said,

In that case,

You should go stay with your lungs for a while.

I was confused.

The look on my face gave it away.

If you're exhausted about your heart's obsession with the fixed past and your mind's focused on the uncertain future,

Your lungs are the perfect,

Perfect place for you.

There's no yesterday in your lungs.

There's no tomorrow there either.

There's only now.

There's only inhale.

There's only exhale.

There's only this moment.

There is only breath.

And in that breath,

You can rest while your heart and head work the relationship out.

This morning,

When my brain was busy reading tea leaves and while my heart was staring at old photographs,

I packed a little bag and I walked to the door of my lungs.

Before I could even knock,

She opened the door with a smile as a gust of air embraced me.

She said,

What took you so long?

I hope you enjoyed this talk about how to deal with awareness of the body or mindfulness of the body.

If you're ready to dive in practicing some of this,

You can check out some of my meditations so you can get out of your brain and opening up to the possibilities,

The unbelievable,

Miraculous,

Amazing,

Never considered possibilities of what it's like when we meet our lives with our of what it's like when we meet our lives with our whole bodies.

Thank you!