The Sense of Well-Being

Once we incarnate into our sense of touch, through which we experience the resistance of something else and the reality of our own boundary, and we find ourselves thrown back into our own center, we move to the perception of “the existence within” our skin. What exists within our skin is our life, our biological organization and the functions that keep us alive. This new sense is called our life sense or our sense of well-being. We don’t pay too much attention to this sense until something is not well within. With touch we perceive “is,” our being is because I experience my limits and boundaries. With well-being we perceive “is not,” I am alert to an absence in my “isness.”

When something is not right, lacking, or overwhelming, our sense of well-being alerts us with feelings of hunger, thirst, exhaustion or dis-ease. As infants and children we depend on others to fill our bellies, quench our thirst, put us to bed, and calm and comfort our dis-ease. Curiously this sense tells us that what resists our touch can also care and provide for us.

Before I go into the soul perceptions of well-being, I want to quickly point out that touch wakes us up to space and well-being wakes us up to time. When our sense of well-being grabs our attention we begin to endure. Duration is the body’s perception of time - how long can I bear this suffering, the absence of my well-being.

Now to the sense that let’s the soul know it is suffering...

Begin with questioning your ability to endure suffering. Your own suffering and the suffering of others? Are you struggling right now with the suffering of the planet, with the Gulf oil spill?

Is it easy for you to repress your suffering? Repressed suffering lives below consciousness and never finds relief. (I know for myself, I learned to endure and put on a happy face at an early age. Eventually, I lost all sense of what was unendurable, found myself seeking relationships that demanded I hunger, thirst, and exhaust myself, etc. It’s a whole story of a very unhealthy sense of well-being. I’ve been in soul recovery for years. I know now it is up to me to notice when my cup is empty and fill it with kindness myself. When it overflows, I can share my kindness with others. There are so many great lessons living in the awareness of well-being.

When your soul is hungry, what is it hungry for? How do you feed your soul? Who else feeds your soul? Think of comfort foods for the soul - a poem, a painting, a string quartet, a long walk, a good movie, telling your truth. Make a list. You might want to make a bunch of little cards with suggestions for soul snacks or soul feasts and keep them in a bowl. When your soul feels hunger rumblings, go to the bowl and pull a card. Enjoy the nourishment.

When your soul is thirsty, dry, parched - do you know this feeling? Where do you go? Where are the sweet waters your soul drinks from? Does the smile of a loved one or a stranger quench your loneliness?

Souls need rest. Do you overwhelm your soul with too much self-help, too much seriousness, too much demand to develop? How do you imagine taking a soul nap? What lullaby would sing your soul into a gentle sleep? If you just close your eyes.

And if your soul knows dis-ease, pain, illness where do you seek healing? When your soul gets inflamed what cools you down? Or if your soul gets chilled, what blankets your thoughts and feelings with warmth?

In your sense journal, make lists of how your soul experiences a lack of well being, when it feels it is losing its liveliness and life. Then make lists of all the wonderful things that restore your soul’s health and wealth. These lists will be an endless source of personal care and wisdom, recipes for delicious soul feasts, juices for a juicy sense of self, soft pillows on which to lay your soul down and all kinds of therapeutic relief and restoration.

If you need a summer conversation for soothing or stimulating, I might have what you are seeking. Read more...

Anxiety and the Twelve Senses

We live in the age of anxiety and our challenge is the transformation of personal anxiety into personal confidence.

Anxiety arises out of a feeling of a gap. A gap is a break in continuity that asks for restoration. It is a hole or interval between you and what you desire that must be bridged. It is a lack of harmony or fit that requires alteration and adjustment.

Gaps occur in our relationship to our bodies, in our relationship to the world, and in our relationship to others. All these relationships are known through our perceptions. If our perceptions are distorted or our organs of perceptions are damaged restoration, bridging, alteration and adjustment appear difficult or impossible. Life becomes threatening. Anxiety increases.

Even confidence in our relationship to God or Spirit asks us to be "grounded" in our earthly perceptions first. Without this healthy and essential earthly life, our spiritual lives live over a gap in human experience.

Consequenttly, a very important way of managing, resolving or eliminating all forms of anxiety is to attend to our perceptions and our organs of perception.

From the perspective of inner development, we can look at twelve senses, twelve organs of perception:

4 senses give us our perception of our embodied self, the world within our skin:
the sense of touch or boundary,
the sense of well-being including our sense of hunger, thirst, exhaustion and pain,
the sense of self-movement and contraction and expansion, and
the sense of balance and uprightness.

4 senses give us our perception of the world beyond our skin:
smell,
taste,
vision and
warmth

and
4 senses give us our perception of what lives within the souls of others:
hearing,
the sense of word and gesture,
the sense of thought, idea and ideal, and
the sense of divine individuality in the other.

All twelve senses weave together to shape our soul and the sense of “I am.” Each one is a treasure of experience and information. But each sense is also fragile.

If any of these twelve senses is skewed with too much sensitivity or to little sensitivity, if any as been traumatized, if any has been inflated, depleted, overwhelmed or ignored, we experience distorted and unsafe perceptions of our meaning, our purpose and our significance. We do not find our perceptions harmonious. We become anxious.

THE TWELVE SENSES
an Inner Year program

Over four 60-minute teleseminars, I will offer a creative understanding of the twelve senses. This is not a boring course. It is filled with liberating “aha’s” and healing insights.

I love the senses - they make sense of every thing. When we have a conscious relationship - a real sense of our senses, we can gracefully master life. Anxiety becomes a “wake-up” feeling, instead of a threat. We do not get stuck in anxious feelings but find ourselves moving through a more dynamic process of growing confidence in all our relationships.

Through the Twelve Senses, we learn how to sustain and deepen the feelings:

I am calmly contained within myself.
I meet my needs for nourishment and restoration.
I move gracefully and purposefully in the right direction.
I am elegantly balanced in all matters.

I breathe in life.
I taste the richness of life.
I see life with clarity and focus
I feel the warmth of life

I hear the voices of other souls.
I recognize the words and gestures of other souls.
I discern the thoughts of other souls.
I love the divine essence within other souls.

These are statements free of anxiety. They are declarations of growing confidence. Knowledge of the twelve senses and understanding of the challenges living in our twelve senses give us ways to move from anxiety to confidence.

The Twelve Senses teleseminar will introduce you to each of the twelve senses and help you grasp the myriad ways the senses interact with each other.

In the fullness of summer, we will experience the fullness of our senses.

Join me for this sensuous and sensible study.

The Twelve Senses
an Inner Year program

*four 60 minute sessions
*sessions will be recorded and available to download for 30 days
*emailed handouts and notes

Sundays at 7:30PM Eastern, 4:30PM Pacific -
July 12,19,26, August 2

$47

Register here.

If you have any questions, email or call me.