The Touch of Mindfulness
Welcome back! Hopefully you’re finding mindfulness to be a helpful tool in staying present in the moment and taking a break from your worries about the past and future. This week, we are going to focus on our sense of touch. A lot of people take this sense for granite, but it’s truly the only one of the 5 senses that we cannot live without. The other senses we can make due with accommodations and can learn to rely on our other senses. Our sense of touch keeps us alive, without this sense we would not be able to gage temperature, notice if we are stepping on something sharp, and we would never experience affection the way we know it.
In doing the exercises with the other senses, there’s a good chance you’ve been noticing and possibly trying to ignore your sensations of touch (i.e. the feeling of the air or the sun on your skin depending on where you were doing the exercises). There’s a few ways we can exercise this sense mindfully considering touch is used by all areas our skin covers the body… so all of it! You can either find something to touch and manipulate with your hands or you can simply sit and notice the air and sunlight on your skin. Regardless of which you choose, the same basic concepts apply. Find an area where you won’t be interrupted for about 10 minutes, take some deep, relaxing breaths, do not judge or force thoughts away- simply notice them and let them go. Now, focus on whatever you are choosing to focus on and take note of the emotional sensations you may be feeling. Asking questions such as: What does the temperature feel like? What does the texture feel like? Is the object rough or smooth? Is it hard or soft? Does it feel different depending on where and how I touch it? And so on…
If you are choosing to notice the sunlight or air, you ask yourself the same questions. The difference being, instead of focusing on the sensations your hands are feeling, you take note of how different areas of your skin are feeling from the sunlight or the air. For example: How does the breeze feel on my arm? Is there a different sensation with my other arm? The breeze hitting my back is cool by but the sunlight touching my shoulders is warming them; which feels better to me? Or do both feel nice?
Again, the idea is that these sensations are being used as anchors to help stay present in the moment to act as a reset so we can calm our active minds. Now, we’ve explored mindfulness for all 5 senses… that’s it right? Of course, not!!! Stay tuned for upcoming blog posts around other ways to utilize mindfulness in your day to day. Next week, we will focus on introspective mindfulness. All of those emotions I’ve been telling you to note and then let float away- next week we will focus on what to do with those emotions and how to be mindful around our emotions and what is eliciting them from us.
Take care and I’ll see you next week!
-James