Engaging Sensory Wisdom
We spend a good portion of our life in auto-pilot. Sometimes this is restorative, like when we are sleeping, or protective like when our autonomic nervous system has reacted to keep us safe. Often, it’s simply habit, like when you walk a familiar route, reach your destination, and realize you can’t really remember much of what you saw on the way. Other times it is intrusive, like when we find ourselves reaching for our device despite our intentions to “unplug”, and instead we find ourselves scrolling through volumes of content designed to hack our natural bio-rhythms.
As we age, our brain develops all sorts of these neurological short-cuts, and one of the challenges that can arise is that we start to become disembodied. Less aware of our physiological cues, instincts and intuition as a mammal. Disconnected from the wisdom that is available to us through our senses in the present moment. What are some clues that we might be disembodied?
Chronic dehydration or not noticing your own thirst
Forgetting to eat, eating without tasting your food, over-eating
Ignoring discomfort that could be easily resolved (for example walking for blocks with a rock in your shoe, or deferring needed bathroom breaks)
Bathing without feeling the temperature or sensation of your water or noticing the scent of your bath products
Eye strain from prolonged or excessive screen time
Unconscious or harmful increases in substance use
Now, there’s no need to panic if some of these happened to resonate with you. There has been a tonne of research over time about various ways to become more embodied as our understanding about the body, brain and neuroscience is constantly evolving. Collectively these are called “bottom-up” approaches (versus “top-down” or more cognitively-oriented approaches) and we can track their progression over time in the literature (below is not an exhaustive summary).
In the late 1990’s, we have Babette Rothschild’s book The Body Remembers exploring somatic memory and the ways that traumas is held in the body. Around the same time, the book Waking the Tiger Healing Trauma by Peter Levine describes our felt sense, as a “medium through which we experience the totality of sensation” or as a “stream moving through an ever-changing landscape” which, “encompasses both the content and climate of our internal and external environments,” (p. 68-70). In the last two decades or so, Jon Kabat-Zinn and many others have brought mindful practices into the mainstream, inviting us to be in the present moment by coming to our senses of sight, sound, touch, taste and smell. David Emerson, who wrote Trauma-Sensitive Yoga in Therapy in 2015, describes the term interoception as a contemplative practice where we develop “awareness of what is going on within the boundary of our own skin”(p.44) by “learning to feel our bodies” (p.57). In her 2018 book, Healing Trauma with Guided Drawing, Art therapist Cornelia Elbrecht notes how sensorimotor art therapy and bilateral body mapping “supports the drawing of motor impulses… sensing and expressing the inner movements of the muscles, the breath, and also the motions of the emotions, and then witnessing the associated thought forms in a nonjudgemental way” (p.37). More recently we have Hillary McBride’s 2021 book, The Wisdom Of Your Body, which helps us to deconstruct the ways that our body wisdom has been systematically diminished over time through racism, sexism, ableism, heterosexism, ageism and sizeism while suggesting several practices to help us cultivate reconnection with our bodies.
It’s unlikely we will be embodied in every moment, but there are skills that we can develop to increase our connection to self. I find that art therapy is particularly useful in this regard because the art materials provide clear sensory input to anchor us within our senses (rather than getting lost in familiar narratives about the past or neurological grooves involving anxiety about the future). This is often especially true for adults, who have had years of messaging that you need to “think clearly, control your body, and not let emotions run away with you”, with the meta-message usually directing us to look externally rather than internally. This is problematic because our gut instincts as mammals and emotional responses as humans contain valuable information, and are often stronger and faster than logic. In our western world, we have privileged logic at the expense of our other ways of knowing. Being creative is one way to carve out spaces that lead us back into our bodies as the home of our sensory wisdom.
Ask yourself these questions and see if your body remembers: can you recall the smell of crayons? The brittle, dry sensation of chalk? The difference in temperature and resistance of clay versus play-dough? All these sensory experiences provide different channels for exploration, problem-solving, discovery and eventually integration or meaning-making. Traversing from the left logic-dominant side of our brain over to the right creatively-oriented side of the brain can expand our perspective, connect us to sensory wisdom and help us tap into under-utilized resources.
If you’d like to experiment with this, I’d invite you to try this art prompt:
1) Identify a problem you’ve been unable to “think your way through”
2) Grab something sculptable (clay, play-dough, cookie dough, aluminum foil, whatever you have handy)
3) Mindfully explore your material with your senses, and without judgment: notice the smell, texture, temperature, tactile qualities, and sounds this material makes.
4) Allow a sense of play, giving yourself permission to be in the moment without an agenda or need to be productive.
5) Explore if your hands would like to make any certain shapes, rhythms, or movements and allow your hands to lead you.
6) Notice when your creation feels “done”.
7) Spend some time being with your creation:
Where are your eyes drawn?
What sensations do you feel in your body?
Does anything surprise you?
Do you notice any emotions arising?
What words come to mind?
What does your creation have to tell you?
