The World Will Hold You (Grounding with you Senses Exercise)
Explore how you use the support of your senses (or not) with 3 exercises
Hello! I’m Kate, a therapist sharing weekly Letters from Therapy. If you enjoy my writing, make sure you’re subscribed! If you wish for deeper self awareness, acceptance and meaning in your life, upgrading to paid gives access to enriching discovery tools. Your support also makes these letters possible, thank you!
A World That Holds You
Hello friends
Do you ever feel lost in emotion, anxiety or turmoil? As if you’re detached, or coasting along all alone? This letter is for you.
My fingers warm as I curl them around my coffee cup. I inhale its enriching scent, a morning gift grown from the earth itself. The white sky waits behind the crack in the curtains as I pull up my cosy duvet, cocooned from the day ahead. The hum of a plane overhead cuts the quiet. My dog jumps up and offers her smooth velvet back for the first stroke of the day, before her wet nose bobs against me as she burrows under, her soft fur brushing against me. I close my eyes and sip the sweet, earthy coffee and let it replenish me.
Attuned with the World
Our body is designed to be in perfect dialogue with our environment we have evolved with over millennia. We are interconnected with it, bound to it thanks to our five highly adapted senses. They tell us if we are warm, cold, in danger. If we are accepted, or outcast. Our senses are primed to pick out sights, sounds and scents, to detect threats and shelter or nutrition, to find each other and be part of a community.
Our senses keep us tuned in, so we can update our behaviour, actions and choices, to optimise our chance of survival and well-being.
I’m currently in equilibrium with my immediate environment, my senses anchoring me here in my tiny spot of the universe.
Being attuned to our environment can also hold us when we are deep in a swell of emotional turmoil, or flooded with anxiety or confusion.
Our senses anchor us to our environment - if we remember to notice.
You might also like Setting Intentions To Reclaim Your Power, Taking The Road Less Travelled and Loving-Kindness for All Beings
A Desensitised Life
In modern life we can get so focussed living on auto that we stop using our senses well. We override them to stay in the familiarity of an internal narrative, or what is fed to us by the office, news, expectations of family and friends, or whispering mums or colleagues (are they really whispering? Is it your mind or your senses telling you?).
Perhaps you adapt thoughts to the visual deception of social media that distorts reality from what is really there. (No, their houses aren’t that tidy, and yes, she did have Botox.)
Chemical tastes and smells trick us into eating food far less nourishing than the scent and taste imply. The ads don’t show them feeling sick afterwards, just the big smiles.
Screens and lights interfere with our natural rhythms if we let them, so we are over aroused and can’t fall asleep.
No wonder we stop trusting our senses.
You might also like Setting Intentions To Reclaim Your Power, Taking The Road Less Travelled and Loving-Kindness for All Beings
Sensory Adaptations
If you grew up in a noisy chaotic environment perhaps you’ve desensitised to sound. If you’ve experienced sexual or physical trauma you may be desensitised to touch. Perhaps you’ve seen too many difficult things so your vision is impaired, like Oedipus’s choice to blind himself: is it better just not to see at all?
As stories bounce around our minds, we reach for another drink, hit send on an unhelpful text, open the next bag of crisps, we shop, we accuse, we hide. We fly into rage, devastation, turmoil, alone.
Did you stop trusting your environment?
Being over adapted or desensitised to what our senses told us in the past can mean cutting off from the core of our humanness. If we are too engrossed in our own thoughts and emotions, we can sever the link between our body’s sensed communion with our environment.
Our environement is there to hold us - if we let it.
Retraining Our Senses to Connect with the World Outside
When we are engaged with what we see, hear, feel, smell and taste we can cut through the turmoil inside us. Even a paranoid person can look around himself and check what’s really happening, and their ghosts will depart.
By bringing our attention to our sensed world, we bring ourselves literally back ‘down to earth’. We cut through turmoil, overwhelm, anxiety or negative thought spirals in an instant. We ground ourselves in our surroundings.
What do you notice when you engage your senses, and use your environment to support you?
Exercise 1. A Senses Atunement Workout
Take a few minutes to explore your senses, strengthening your sensing ‘muscles’.
(If you’ve experienced trauma, or childhood neglect), desensitising can be a means of self protection. If this is you, go gently, and get support if you need it.
If you are already highly sensitive, you may not need to hone your sensitivity, but you can use your environment as a support to you if you’re distressed or anxious.
Notice 5 things you can see
Notice 4 things you can feel
Notice 3 things you can hear
Notice anything you can smell
Notice anything you can taste
Spend time today and this week observing your senses. We are embodied beings and this will enhance your sense of yourself as part of this world.
When you are upset, engage your senses and anchor yourself in the world until you come back into balance. Try it!
For two more exercises with prompts to explore how your senses can support your mental health and well-being. Visit the Personal Growth Tools Page for this and worksheets from previous posts.
If you enjoy my writing, make sure you’re subscribed for weekly ‘letters from therapy’. If you wish for deeper self awareness, acceptance and meaning in your life, upgrading to paid gives access to enriching discovery tools. Your support also makes these letters possible, thank you!
Let me know your reflections. For example, what do you notice when you engage your senses, and use your environment to support you?
A wonderful reminder to be mindful, Kate. To live in the present moment & not let life pass us by. So easy to get caught up in the buzz these days. Thanks for this!