What are we doing here?
We are creating moments of curious awareness on sensation.
What does this look like?
Your awareness can be on sensation at any moment. The quality of this awareness, i.e. your mood, can also vary from one moment to the next. It can look like many things from the external perspective. For example, you might experience it while dancing, playing a sport, having an interesting conversation with someone, or even right now when you take a moment to sense yourself.
Many somatic movement practices emphasize subtle and slow movements, often while lying down. Slowness and subtlety lessen the amount of sensory information per moment while lying down lessens the body's need to balance in gravity. We reduce the amount of default sensory input and motor output necessary in each moment so that we can practice awareness on sensation more easily.
What is curious awareness on sensation?
Curious awareness is perpetually interested in more information. It values observing over analyzing.
For anything we can interact with, sensation is the only raw information and everything else is an approximation represented symbolically. We experience information through light, sound, touch, etc. and, usually, quickly analyze and conclude what we are observing. This conclusion is expressed as categorizations.
The ability to quickly process sensory information into categories is immensely helpful for survival of our organism and transferring knowledge. We can communicate through the air, travel through space, and control machines with our brains. This technology exists because we can approximate and categorize our sensory world and then transfer this information to each other through symbols. You are reading this because our species is hella clever.
In somatic practice, we welcome concepts, analyses, and conclusions arising, but we aim to bring awareness back to sensation. This is the practice: moments of awareness on sensation.
What are the results?
The result is self-regulation in posture and movement. You innately know how to organize your muscles and skeleton efficiently. This information is encoded within you. When you were a baby (so cute) (and you still are so cute), much of your awareness was on your sensory experience. Without language or concepts, you learned how to roll, crawl, walk, smile, and even dance! Nobody taught you this. The recipe for this result was many moments of curious awareness on sensation.
More efficient posture and movement means you know how to contract less muscle fibers as you hold postures and move through space. In other words, you have access to new movement options that require less energy. The result is an increased feeling of fluidity (both internal and in as you interact with the world), increased ability to relax, and a new attention surplus.
Also,
increasing your bodily awareness and movement fluidity leads to a greater sense of confidence and safety as you move through space. In turn, you have greater capacity to explore your environment and experience new things.
Far out. Far In.
What exists within you, that when fed pure sensory information, results in your body organizing itself to move more efficiently? This information that instructs how to move and how to feel better, what is it's origin?
Is this easy?
How easy it is for you to sense yourself with curious awareness depends on your experiences, the volume and frequency of stimuli in your environment, and your belief in the benefits.
People like somatic therapists and countless other professions develop methods and techniques aimed at sharing ways in to sensing the self.
But if we were created with the ability to do this and our survival depends on it, why is it so hard? Speaking from my own experiences and observations, some of the reasons why sensing the self is challenging include the following:
Abundant external stimuli from technology and condensed living.
Ease of access to, and benefits from, engaging with technology that leads to less dependency on an optimally functioning body.
Not knowing how to productively interact with tension patterns in the body that are a result of unprocessed physical or psychological trauma.
Believing that there is no benefit to sensing oneself or that there is always a better object to place awareness on.
Being unaware of, or not knowing how to maintain, productive moods (qualities of awareness) when sensing the self.
How do we sense ourselves?
We can practice this so that it comes more naturally to us. I will soon post resources here to begin practicing.