Cultivating The Senses + Your Design

I’m currently reading The Heartbeat of Trees by Peter Wohlleben, and I always LOVE reading anything about the senses. I have literary ties in the Cognition module because it’s important to recognize the poetry in our bodies and to holistically fatten our experiential wisdom. What we now know about our sensing body is growing but, like many things, I think it’s the tip of the iceberg. We want to invite deeper awareness while we also recognize there is much we do not comprehend. I wanted to share some inspiring scientific bits from the book which may offer you some new insight + share some tools. Check out those that you carry in your definition whether through Determination, Environment Tone, Cognition, Color Resonance or even Gates. I will draw some correlations below. However, regardless of if you have Gate 44 or Smell Cognition, you likely have a nose. It can behoove all of us, in all the ways, to bring more intention around our capacities to sense the world around and within us.

SIGHT

Think: Outer Vision Cognition or environment tone + Gates 61, 63 and 64 for intuitive sight, gate 17 (the right eye), gate 11 (the left eye)

On the improvement rather than deterioration of his eye sight; “For my work, I spend a lot of the day out in the forest evaluating trunks and crown in stands of trees that were to be thinned, and I did all of this from a distance. I also spent a lot of my free time outside, repairing pasture fences or sawing logs for firewood. Near-sightedness, therefore, is not an evolutionary adaptation as I feared, but simply our eyes adapting to seeing things up close, as they need to for reading. Spending time out in nature and looking up or far away, at least when you are young, can improve or even prevent the problem.”

Spend time opening up your field of vision. This is actually also linked to reducing neck tension. We spend much of our day focusing our vision at little screens. Practice widening your lens. Soften your gaze and open your inner aperture. Get into nature. Look out into the distance. Take in the landscape view. Lay on a blanket and watch the clouds pass over. What objects do you see? And also notice the spaces between.

HEARING

Think: Sound Determinations (High/Low) , Gate 57 - intuitive hearing and the right ear, Valleys by color resonance, Gate 43 (the inner ear), gate 22 (the left ear)

“Gruters tested sixteen subjects sitting in a completely darkened room. This allowed them to concentrate on colored LED light that they were to track visually. Amazingly, the first thing that moved was not the subjects’ eyes but their eardrums, which oriented toward the points of light. It took just 10 milliseconds for the subjects’ eyes to follow. You could, therefore, say that the eyes and the ears were directed to an object at about the same time. What’s important here is not the time lag, but the fact that we line up our auditory apparatus at all, an alignment that had never been noticed before. Even more surprising is that the test subjects’ ears were oriented not to a sound but to an object they wanted to observe with their eyes. Gruters’ studies clearly show we still have a thing or two to learn when it comes to our physical capabilities and, above all, that even our supposedly feeble and fixed ears can surprise us at any time with what they can do.”

One of my favorite things about teaching yoga outdoors was the exercise where you invite students to meditate on sound. Sound was actually the first thing I myself meditated on because when I learned meditation many years ago, I was way too anxious to sit with my breath or my body. So, I would meditate on traffic, something outside of myself, which after awhile began to sound like waves in the ocean. When meditating on sound, we notice the closest sound we can hear and then we continue to “stretch” our hearing to hear sounds farther and farther away. Give this a try, especially in nature, notice what you can hear when you reach. Practice tuning in to the sounds you’d like to hear. What might your ears be ‘seeing’ first?

SMELL

Think: Smell Cognition and/or environment tone + Gate 44

“The nose, however, is not the only organ we smell with. We also have olfactory receptor in our bronchial tubes, which expand when they detect certain scents. And even our small intestine gets involved in sniffing our food. The discovery is important because, in the natural world, we are exposed to a limited number of smells. The current flood of artificial compounds in perfumes, scented candles, and household cleaners can therefore cause intestinal discomfort and adversely affect our well-being. When some people smell little to nothing in the forest, they are not necessarily being inattentive. It could be that they have lost some or all of their ability to smell.”

So, as an HSP, this can be a bit of a soapbox for me, I’ll attempt to refrain and just invite you to do some research if you use artificially scented products, cleaners, perfumes, plug-ins, candles, etc… We are bombarded with these highly toxic chemicals which have been compared to the new second hand smoke and have MANY negative influences on our overall health + well-being. Unfortunately, they keep gaining in intensity with detergents that pack a punch for weeks, and attach themselves to anyone in their aura, which… why? If this is a gift you carry in your chart I would especially invite you to take care of your nose by eliminating these products as much as possible, and to practice tuning in with what you smell. What does your food smell like? What smells good to you? Who smells good to you… as this also carries intuitive smell. Get out into nature, close your eyes and breathe deep.

TASTE

Think: Taste Determinations (Open/Closed), TASTE COGNITION and/or environment tone, Markets environment by resonance, gate 48

“Our food and drink, just like the environment in which we live, have undergone evolutionary change. The only products that survive on supermarket shelves are the products people buy. And so, manufacturer’s develop foods that appeal most to our sense of taste. Their methods get ever-more sophisticated and match our desires ever-more precisely, which is also one of the reasons we find it so difficult not to reach for those particular foods. Sugar, salt, and fat - enrich that combination with other flavor enhancers and we end up eating more than our body needs. In the process, we increasingly forget what natural, unprocessed food tastes like. I don’t mean fruits and vegetables, because even these are being similarly transformed through selective breeding, always sweeter, always with fewer bitter compounds. In comparison with the rich variety of flavors available in nature, the food we eat all tastes more or less the same.”

There are 6 Tastes: sweet. sour, bitter, salty, pungent and astringent. Try incorporating more of the ones often overlooked like bitter and sour into your diet to cultivate more balance and expand your taste ‘vocabulary’. Begin every morning with lemon water, add some bitter greens like dandelion, radicchio, endive and mustard greens to your salad or stir fry. Your liver will thank you. Much like with Taste cognition, and trying out different experiences, you want to also expand your palate. Experiment, balance, try some new foods.

And, read above about smell - because we don’t just breathe in those chemicals, they enter through our mouth, our skin, permeating our gut, brain, other organ systems, etc… We really want to not only avoid the chemicals and fake scents in detergents, candles, cleaners, etc.. but also “natural flavors”, pesticides + additives in our food which can encompass a whole host of chemicals and compounds we’d be much better off skipping.

Go spend some time forest bathing, with a minimally processed lunch.

touch

THINK: TOUCH COGNITION + environment tone, gate 6 and 37

“SEE, TOUCH, LEARN - THAT is a triad that can easily get out of sync in our modern world. The more information we get from our smartphones and televisions, the less we use our sense of touch. It’s too early to say what the long-term consequences might be, but it certainly can’t hurt to take remedial action right now.

The next time you are walking outside, try touching a variety of objects. The feather lying by the side of the path is just waiting to be picked up. Even the slippery rock covered with algae offers unusual experiences of contact and motion.”

When it comes to Touch my recommendation is to always surround yourself with tactile experiences that feel good and nourishing to you and to explore touching all the things. Most people I know with Touch as their Cognition really need to put their hands on someone to know how they feel about them. Pay attention to what arises when you reach out and touch someone or something. What information does it offer?

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Experiment, play, expand. Check in everyday with your senses and write a couple of words in your journal around what you encountered and experienced through them, as well as senses + perceptions less talked about or recognized (like Peter mentions how we can sense changes in the weather before they happen) and of course your intuition as well. What synchronicities and signs showed up in your world, what insights came through. When we honor and bring awareness, we strengthen and grow our capacity. We are all on a journey to be less in our heads and more in our bodies, this is a perfect way to intentionally, cumulatively, tune in. Our senses are a gateway to greater groundedness, embodiment + pleasure in life.

I definitely recommend picking up his book. I also loved his older one, The Hidden Life of Trees, so fascinating.

Members can go deeper with the sensorial + intuitive Gates in Knowing by Design + explore all your Variables.

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