Day 4 -Making Sense of Our Senses

Hi everyone! This is day 4. More than half way.

I hope you'll stay with it. You can do it! :)

This is definitely a meditation you can do outside, if you want a change, in nature in the garden or on the beach.

Just as we use the breath as an anchor to stay aware in the present, we can use our senses. How many senses do we have? Usually people talk about the 5 senses.

Actually, we should probably start by saying that we have many more than five senses. The ancient Greek, Aristotle, first described the five senses but we've moved on a bit since 322BC. We now know that we have other sensory receptors in our body such as thermoception (heat), nociception (internal organs) proprioception (positional) and equilibrioception (balance), as well as receptors which detect chemicals (such as hormones), etc. And here we haven't even scratched the surface.

For this purpose, we will use the traditional 5 senses: sight, sound, touch, taste and smell. In meditation we can also include our thoughts as a sense, because in meditation we work with 6 senses, the 6th sense being our mind. But for this short practice we won’t do that.

We can only make contact with the world around us through our senses. Imagine if we couldn’t see, hear, feel taste or smell. The world wouldn’t be available to us and we wouldn’t be able to survive. We need touch to prevent us from burning ourselves, for instance.

While most of us use all our senses daily, we don’t usually notice them particularly or exclusively, unless perhaps there’s something wrong with one of them, for instance a stuffy nose or a sensory overload of if music is too loud or lights are too bright.

Using our senses as a mindfulness practice can not only reconnect us to the present moment, it can also help us to practice observing, generate patience and looking at things from a different perspective. It’s a really quick and easy way to bring our attention back to the present moment and stop a racing mind.

When we look, hear, feel, taste or smell something, we can use mindfulness to look at it in a different way. Besides paying a special kind of attention to it, which we often don’t do (think scoffing a ‘sarmie’ while checking whatsapp or watching tv.), we can also use mindfulness not to be bothered by uncomfortable sensations such as sounds or pins and needles while sitting in meditation.

The idea is to observe the experience with a slight detachment rather than being right inside it. For instance, you might notice a sound which might be unwelcome, but not feel disturbed by it. This is particularly important when meditating, because if we learn to meditate only when the conditions are ‘perfect’ we would quickly lose our concentration when conditions are not ‘perfect’ - which they will usually not be.

So instead of labeling it and thereby making the experience good or bad, we would just listen to the sound, notice the tone, the pitch, the gaps and silences in between the sounds, etc. Listening intently and mindfully automatically brings you into the present moment because you can’t listen to yesterday’s or tomorrow’s sound. And, as we already know, when we are present, we are not worrying about what has already happened or imagining something which may never happen.

In the short meditation to follow, we'll connect to :

5 things you can see

4 things you can feel

3 things you can hear

2 things you can smell

1 thing you can taste