Day 5: Using Your Senses
“To be alive in this beautiful, self-organizing universe — to participate in the dance of life with senses to perceive it, lungs that breathe it, organs that draw nourishment from it — is a wonder beyond words.”
— Joanna Macy
Today’s practice is an invitation to exercise your five predominant senses – sight, hearing, taste, smell, and touch. Doing this can bring you into your present moment experience, providing an avenue for embodiment and intimacy with the other-than-human world. It can also be a helpful practice to use if and when you find yourself overwhelmed, anxious, or in some other way dysregulated or disembodied.
This practice ends with what we like to call savoring. This is an essential part of the practice – it’s really a practice in and of itself – that helps to lay down memory and new neural pathways. As we are in the process throughout these 13 days of orienting more and more toward wellness and wholeness, these few moments to quietly remember the experience you just had is a necessary part of the rewiring process.
Before you start, gather together a few things: something to inspire your sense of touch, another your sense of smell, and finally, something to taste.
