This practice is called the sense of being alive and as usual I invite you to find a really good base for sitting.
You can activate the polyvagal nerve by moving your hips back and forth,
Finding that center point where you feel that lift and coming back to that hip movement if you find yourself getting sleepy and closing your eyes and allowing the mind to drop down into the body.
And we're going to work our way through the senses,
Connecting first with touch.
This is the first sense that awakens in the fetus in the womb.
So how does touch show up for you right now?
Where the body touches something that is not the body,
Perhaps your feet on the floor,
Your bum on a chair.
What's the felt sense of these touches?
Now perhaps widening that circle of awareness to take in all the other areas of touch where the skin touches clothes and how through touch there is the appearance of a body sitting here.
How is this body assembled by this sense of touch?
This inner sense of there being a body with skin,
Sinew,
Muscle,
Bone and all the internal organs and blood.
This incredibly complex system constantly self-monitoring,
Kind of fleshy feedback loop,
Really reviewing as objectively as possible this way that touch aids the showing up of a body here in this moment.
Even in a kind of stillness we can feel the breath,
The rise and fall of the abdomen.
So we can never be,
While we're alive,
Completely still.
What does the touch of the breath feel like?
First of all in the rise and fall of the abdomen,
In the expansion of the lungs,
Contraction of the lungs,
And in each breath the touch of the air in the nostrils.
With this we activate another sense,
A sense of smell.
What scent does the air passing through the nostrils carry?
Because the brain suppresses any information that it deems irrelevant to our survival,
We might not be able to smell anything initially,
Nothing of interest.
What does nothing of interest smell like?
And how about taste?
Where does taste happen?
And what tastes arise for us in this moment?
Notice by simply dropping our attention into the taste sense whether there's a change,
Perhaps more saliva in the mouth,
And with the mouth empty,
What's the default taste?
What does nothing to taste taste like?
We can apply the same to sight now.
What does,
With the eyes closed,
What does nothing to see look like?
Where does seeing happen?
Is the act of seeing simply to do with the eyes,
With the eyes closed?
What does seeing become?
With hearing it's not so easy to close arias.
Notice how the hearing scans the environment.
It scans the environment and labels everything you hear into relevant,
Irrelevant,
To avoid,
To approach,
Or to be indifferent to.
And seeing if you can,
After noticing that process,
Suspend it for a while so that sounds just become sounds,
Waves,
Frequencies entering like waves on the beach,
Landing on your eardrum without meaning,
Without rhyme or reason.
And these sound waves hitting the eardrum,
Like all the senses,
Are translated into electronic impulses fed into this brain in a black box to construct meaning,
To secrete a physical reality of a body in an environment that must negotiate with the world to survive and thrive.
An important part of that process for the human as well is thought.
So turning our attention now to thought and seeing if we can encounter thought in the same manner as we encountered sound.
It's just arising,
Thoughts arising,
Electricity in the brain assembling meaning,
Impulses to act or to justify action after the act.
Thoughts projecting a model of ourselves in the world,
In space and time,
In the past and in the future.
And then like the other senses,
Notice how we lay claim to these thoughts.
We believe ourselves to be the author of these thoughts.
Notice that claiming process.
I'm definitely a body in an environment thinking these thoughts and also feeling these feelings,
Perhaps the most intimate part of ourselves,
The most familiar part,
These feelings and emotions to which we also lay claim.
Notice how with thought we're aware of our authorship,
But with emotions we lay claim,
But we are not the author of what we feel.
We believe them to stem from some kind of reality,
To confirm opinions,
To confirm a reality.
Feelings too are in flux,
Arising and falling.
Some as moods hang around for longer,
Some as personalities can last a lifetime.
And this whole assembly,
The touching,
Smelling,
Tasting,
Hearing,
Seeing,
Thinking,
Feeling,
Happen within a wider sense that we're often not aware of.
We're so preoccupied with those seven senses and yet those seven senses can only be noticed.
We can only be aware of them because of this other sense.
I invite you to connect with this other sense now,
The sense of being alive,
Not as a concept,
But aliveness itself.
Where does aliveness happen?
Does aliveness arise and fall in our experience right now?
Or rather is it everything arises and falls away in this aliveness?
Are we the author of aliveness?
Who is the one that lays claim,
Who claims this aliveness?
And if we relinquish that claim,
If we surrender the claim,
Does aliveness dissipate or does aliveness grow?
Resting now in this sense of aliveness as we come to the end of this practice,
Seeing even with our eyes open,
If we can continue to rest in this aliveness from which all else arises,
Including the claim,
The claim to it.
Taking a deep breath in and a deep breath out,
A deep breath in and a deep breath out,
A deep breath in,
Holding it and as we breathe out,
We breathe out making the AH sound,
A-H-AH,
And opening our eyes.
Three,
Two,
One,
AH.
