Using your Body’s Felt Senses

PRACTICE GUIDE – Presencing

What are Felt Senses?

Obviously, without our body we would have no mind. consciousness or thought, yet we have stopped paying attention to our innate capacity and therefore lost our ability to use the power of our body’s intelligence.

What you are doing is using your body as a source of feedback to improve your decision-making by explaining the subtle tensions and generating questions that serve your sense of being true to what you care about at a deeper level of awareness. Why are you saying “yes” when your body is shaking your head from side to side”? Why are you going along with something that is causing an ache in your gut or a pain in your neck?

Your senses are trying to tell you something, but you are blind to your body’s messagesbecause you don’t trust them. Perhaps you need to “wake up” and “feel more” to make more subtle distinctions about what really matters to you and what you are sensing from reading the body reactions and gestures of others.

Regaining confidence in your intuition and trusting your the insights that come from observing and knowing how to use your body’s senses more effectively could transform the quality of your listening, generate greater empathy in relationships, get more control over your emotions by noticing changes at an early stage and gain the peace that relaxing the muscles and improving your breathing to your overall health and wellbeing.

So what does this mean?

The new of brain sciences are confirming wat we intuitively know. When we open or close our physical structures, we open or close off possibilities for thinking, feeling and action. A great deal is now known about the way our nervous system responds to tension and stress in the body, by firing neurons that generate a “hard-wired” response where body, emotions, and language get involved in changing behaviour.

Changes in one area of the brain cause changes in others. When anger emerges it can be observed in body posture, tension in the muscles, negative language and impact on our attachment to others. These changes in the wiring of brain circuits can occur at any time in life as a result of new and healing experiences. The new wiring that changes behaviour over time is the way our brain learns and changes from experience. A process of neuroplasticity.

As a result, these “hard-wired” pathways create structures that determine how we are going to behave in different social contexts. They become habitual and more difficult to change. This is because the fatty Myelin deposits found on our Emotional Neurons allow the signals to move faster than Motor Neurons. That’s why we need to feel more from what is happening in our body to stop us reacting without reflecting.

The nerve cells of our senses are larger and communicate faster to catch more of your attention. This is because the Axon pathway is covered with a fatty substance called Myelin. As a result, they connect together to create structures that determine how we are going to behave in different contexts. They produce habitual links that become “hard-wired” and more difficult to change. That’s why we need to stop and feel more from what is happening in our body to stop us reacting without reflecting on the thought that produced it. You can observe this in intimate contact, where the feeling of closeness enables you to feel secure and the body relaxes. If these feelings rely on your dependency on others then if the closeness is lost then insecurities and tensions creep in. Anger and anxiety can emerge when the tension and stress appear in the body when the comfort that comes from intimacy is lost. Whilst we can rationalise our relationships conceptually, we still have to deal with our sensations and perceptions. A balance has to be struck between:

• OUTSIDE-IN (exteroception)  – relating to stimuli that are external to an organism.
• INSIDE-OUT (interoception) – the sense of the physiological condition of the body
• BOTTOM-UP (prorioception) – the sense of the relative position of one’s own parts of the body relative to others to achieve and desired purpose.
• TOP-DOWN (perceptual) – interpreting brain data using cognition to exert control over thought and action.

Ignoring the role of “interoception” is to ignore the body-to-brain connection found in physiological signals (e.g. pain, ‘sensual touch and thermal sensations). Emotions too are perceptions of changes in the body’s physiology. Our felt senses allow us to experience life with heightened intensity and appreciation. The more you can wake up to your sensory perceptions the more you will  “feel yourself”, and the stronger you intuition and empathy will be.

Now what?

To be able to describe and assess what you are feeling you need the language needed to make more distinctions, For example, you will need the describe the feeling in physical words to explain its shape, size, sensitivity, temperature, pressure, movement, etc.

It will enable you to “see” more and compare the different between the sensations of one feeling compared with another.  You become more self-aware and can identify what an emotion feels like in your body. You can sense your anger developing before it gets fully expressed. It’s not unlike the way a car mechanic knows the parts and sounds of an engine and where to look to fix a problem before it breaks down.  

It’s the distinctions a car mechanic can make that you can’t that gives him the edge in being able to keep the car on the road. With more words to describe your experience, and can go deeper and connect what you are feeling to another experience in life. This can provide invaluable insights for seeing how you can apply what you have done to deal with one feeling when you experience it in another context.

Practices

1. To increase your awareness of your body and gain access to your inner wisdom take some time out to bring your attention to places where you notice sensations, tension or contraction. What are you feeling right now?

• Describe the mood state you are at this point in time
• Shake your body and rub your arms and upper body briskly to wake up your circulation and get the blood flowing
• Notice which part of your body captures your attention and describe how it feels. Hot, tense, tight, aching?
• Energy will flow to the places you focus on
• Now change your posture to a more open and upright position with you feet firmly on the floor so you feel balanced.
• Do you notice any change in your mood state?
• What new actions are available to you now? Describe any changes.

2. Next time you are in a conversation with someone, pay attention to any sensations in your body and observe your own body posture. Then ask if they are having a similar feeling and suggest a change in posture. Up your energy level and mood state by using optimistic language.  Notice how this affects their way of being.

3. Bring you awareness to the top of your head and notice any sensations that are there.  Give yourself enough time to feel before moving down. Pay particular attention to what your body is saying to you as you relax:

• by slowing your breathing
• muscles around your eyes and mouth
• the jaw – allowing it to drop
• upper back, neck, and shoulders
• slow your breathing even more
• upper arms, elbows, wrists, hands, and fingers
• middle back, rib cage, internal organs
• slow your breathing even more
• lower back, pelvic muscles, hips
• buttocks, thighs, knees, ankles, feet, and toes
• sit calmly for few minutes and just pay attention to your breathing to release an tension

Reflect on any sensations you noticed, what else you became aware of and what you learned from the exercise to improve it.

4. Make a list of all the words you can think of to describe temperature, pressure, tension, and movement.

References

Listening to Bodies by Suzanne Zemen.Shasta Gardens 2008
Presence -Based Coaching by Doug Silsbee. Jossey-Bass 2008