when we are living in contradiction to what our hearts, bodies, minds, spirits, cells know, we find ourselves in a state of worry, anxiety and eventually exhaustion. each step in the downward spiral makes it more and more difficult to know how to make amends – i should have done this, i should have done that – i shouldn’t have done this, i shouldn’t have done that – when we are disembodied from our own knowing of what is right for us, life because a chess game that doesn’t end. and it gets harder and harder as we keep trying to think our way out of it.we can’t think our way out of it. coming back to life is an experience that can’t be thought, only experienced. to try and think our way through puts the cart before the horse. thought makes sense of experiences, not the other way around. but thought will hold us back from experiencing.
But we can improve our experiences with thought – forethought – anticipating what might come up and being prepared. And in this way, we can be a co-creator of experience, with our environment and the others around us. As my friend Hana said – Chance favors the prepared mind.
When we need to get out of thought and back into experience, what can we do? Anything that “brings us to our senses.” Play music. Dance. Cook. Practice Mindfulness. And, Michael Cohen names 54 senses – and I count these too. Like, put your face in the sun. Lay down and roll around, feeling gravity. Relax. What other ways can you find yourself into your senses?
The Radiation Senses
1. Sense of light and sight, including polarized light.
2. Sense of seeing without eyes such as heliotropism or the sun sense of plants.
3. Sense of color.
4. Sense of moods and identities attached to colors.
5. Sense of awareness of one’s own visibility or invisibility and consequent camouflaging.
6. Sensitivity to radiation other than visible light including radio waves, X rays, etc.
7. Sense of Temperature and temperature change.
8. Sense of season including ability to insulate, hibernate and winter sleep.
9. Electromagnetic sense and polarity which includes the ability to generate current (as in the nervous system and brain waves) or other energies.
The Feeling Senses
10. Hearing including resonance, vibrations, sonar and ultrasonic frequencies.
11. Awareness of pressure, particularly underground, underwater, and to wind and air.
12. Sensitivity to gravity.
13. The sense of excretion for waste elimination and protection from enemies.
14. Feel, particularly touch on the skin.
15. Sense of weight, gravity and balance.
16. Space or proximity sense.
17. Coriolus sense or awareness of effects of the rotation of the Earth.
18. Sense of motion. Body movement sensations and sense of mobility.
The Chemical Senses
19. Smell with and beyond the nose.
20. Taste with and beyond the tongue.
21. Appetite or hunger for food, water and air.
22. Hunting, killing or food obtaining urges.
23. Humidity sense including thirst, evaporation control and the acumen to find water or evade a flood.
24. Hormonal sense, as to pheromones and other chemical stimuli.
The Mental Senses
25. Pain, external and internal.
26. Mental or spiritual distress.
27. Sense of fear, dread of injury, death or attack.
(25-27 are attractions to seek additional natural attractions in order to support and strengthen well-being, attractions to run for your life. They are part of Nature’s attractive dance, not “repulsions” )
28. Procreative urges including sex awareness, courting, love, mating, maternity, paternity and raising young.
29. Sense of play, sport, humor, pleasure and laughter.
30. Sense of physical place, navigation senses including detailed awareness of land and seascapes, of the positions of the sun, moon and stars.
31. Sense of time and rhythm.
32. Sense of electromagnetic fields.
33. Sense of weather changes.
34. Sense of emotional place, of community, belonging, support, trust and thankfulness.
35. Sense of self including friendship, companionship, and power.
36. Domineering and territorial sense.
37. Colonizing sense including compassion and receptive awareness of one’s fellow creatures, sometimes to the degree of being absorbed into a superorganism.
38. Horticultural sense and the ability to cultivate crops, as is done by ants that grow fungus, by fungus who farm algae, or birds that leave food to attract their prey.
The Mental Senses (cont…)
39. Language sense, used to express feelings and convey information in every medium from the bees’ dance to uniquely human articulation, stories and literature.
40. Sense of humility, appreciation, ethics.
41. Senses of form and design.
42. Sense of reason, including memory and the capacity for logic and science.
43. Sense of mind and consciousness.
44. Intuition or subconscious deduction.
45. Aesthetic sense, including creativity and appreciation of beauty, music, literature, form, design and drama.
46. Psychic capacity such as foreknowledge, clairvoyance, clairaudience, psychokinesis, astral projection and possibly certain animal instincts and plant sensitivities.
47. Sense of biological and astral time, awareness of past, present and future events.
48. The capacity to hypnotize other creatures.
49. Relaxation and sleep including dreaming, meditation, brain wave awareness.
50. Sense of pupation including cocoon building and metamorphosis.
51. Sense of excessive stress and capitulation.
52. Sense of survival by joining a more established organism.
53. Spiritual sense, including conscience, capacity for sublime love, ecstasy, a sense of sin, profound sorrow and sacrifice.
54. Sense of homeostatic unity, of instinctive natural attraction aliveness and survival.