Stop and Use Your Senses

Sometimes, life moves so fast we forget to use our senses to perceive the world around us

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How much of your time is spent in your head as opposed to your five senses? I'll bet the answer is the vast majority of your day.

The truth is, we spend a great deal of time thinking, ruminating, analyzing, hypothesizing, philosophizing, that we forget to breathe.

We lose sight (literally) of our surroundings. We overlook the feeling in our fingertips as we grasp an object, we neglect the taste of the food we are eating, we forget to stop and smell the roses (or the car exhaust) nearby.

We listen, but mostly to the endless stream of thoughts running through our heads. We worry about what tomorrow brings without dealing with the present day at hand.

We forget to be in our bodies

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The world stresses the need to stay informed, to stay current on the latest trends, to update to the latest release, to understand the newest meme to regurgitate at the next social gathering.

But it overlooks the simple aspect of being present, of being in one's body and using the 5 senses to understand the world and our place in it. The simple act of listening to one's body and using these evolutionary tools of awareness allows us to remember the basis of our humanity.

Despite all of the technological gear, we are still living, breathing, feeling organisms. Whether you believe we are a human having a spiritual experience or a spirit having a human experience, our reality is primarily rooted in the physical realm.

The senses can be scary to use

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We are proficient at forgetting and superb at ignoring what our senses are trying to tell us. The information age has undervalued the information originating from our own bodies, as if they are no longer relevant.

In actuality, utilizing our senses is fundamental to understanding our reality. If we are disconnected from our senses, whatever information is bouncing around in our brains isn't tangible or usable in any real sense.

Of course, utilizing our mind to discern reality is also essential in making sense of our world. Proper methods of critical thinking, specifically by using tools such as the trivium and quadrivium, are a necessary component to parsing reality.

But we cannot fully make sense of our reality if we don't use our senses.

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Life moves fast, but the senses give us the power to slow it down, to take in all of the information that is available to us in the moment. If you want to make time move slower, take a minute to focus on your breath and use your senses.

We can never return to 'simpler times' as a society, but we can utilize our senses to simplify our personal experience of the world. We become bored of the baseline experience of sight, smell, sound, touch, and taste because we are so accustomed to constant amusement from external sources.

But these are the things that are driving us mad, creating false divisions in the psyche that sabotage our experience of life and ourselves. When we only listen to the incessant chatter in our mind, we make our reality incoherent and fractured.

A lucid and holistic approach to existence must include a strong emphasis on our sensory perception, otherwise we are doomed to a life of nonsense.

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All uncredited pictures from pixabay.com or my personal account

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