What’s in it for me? Unlock your senses
What’s your relationship with your body?
Many people are like dutiful janitors to their bodies – they try to keep themselves in good working order. But what if, instead of pulling shifts as your body’s grumbling janitor, you could experience your body as a temple, and yourself as an ecstatic worshiper?
It’s possible to bring about this radical change in your relationship with yourself. And the key – or perhaps we should say the five keys – lie in learning to awaken and engage your senses.
Are you ready to embark on the profound and joyful process of reconnecting with yourself and your myriad sensory capabilities?
Then let’s begin.
Don’t just see – look
The artist Andy Warhol once observed: “Nobody ever really looks at anything. It’s too hard.”
Now, your first instinct might be to disagree with Warhol. Hang on Andy, you might think, I’m looking at a banana or a teaspoon or – insert whatever you’re looking at here – right now. But are you really looking? Are you paying attention to the brown spots and streaks splashed across the banana’s yellow skin? Or the blurred convex reflection in the teaspoon’s silver bowl?
Most of us use our sight in a utilitarian way much of the time – we use it to negotiate a traffic crossing, weave through a crowd, or scan a supermarket for milk and eggs. We can become so focused on our visual objective that we miss what’s surprising and unexpected – how else did those Game of Thrones producers not notice that infamous Starbucks cup on the table in one of the fantasy drama’s tense final scenes?
Luckily, you can learn to look – really look – instead of contenting yourself with seeing. Here are a few exercises to sharpen your sense of sight:
Give yourself homework. The next time you go for a walk around your neighborhood, set yourself a challenge to notice three hats or find five diamond-shaped things.
Stare into the face of someone you know well. Everything you see is actually filtered from your eyes and through your brain before you register it. Your brain spends a disproportionate amount of processing power on other people’s faces. That’s because faces are a trove of useful information. Notice this person’s expression – the arch of their eyebrows, the shape their mouth is held in. What does it tell you?
Notice color. Did you know different languages label colors differently? For example, Pirahã speakers in the Brazilian Amazon only use “light” or “dark” to describe colors, while in Russian there are two different words for light blue and dark blue. What colors speak to you and how could you describe them? Mushroom gray? Frog-belly green? McDonald’s arches yellow?
Make a point of looking at the same thing twice – or more! Pick a favorite sight – the view from a certain window at a certain time of day, for example – and revisit it over and over. What stays the same? What’s different?
Finally, perhaps there’s something you’d like to spend less time looking at. It might be resting in your pocket or sitting beside you on the table right now. That’s right, I’m talking about your mobile phone. It’s specifically designed to be visually enticing. That’s why it’s so hard to put down. If you change it to grayscale you’ll soon find you spend way less time gazing down at a tiny screen – leaving you with more time to experience the magic of looking around.
Hearing is magic
As with all the senses, there’s a perfectly logical scientific explanation for how and why your sense of hearing works. Basically, the world is full of vibrations. These vibrations are picked up by your ear, based on their frequency and intensity, then sifted through your outer ear, middle ear, and inner ear, until they’re transmitted to your brain where they register as sound.
But just think about the kaleidoscope of ways in which you experience these vibrations: a symphony by Mozart, a child’s laughter, the song of a whale. Magical, right?
What’s more, while hearing has been crucial to human survival and evolution – it’s always handy to be able to hear a woolly mammoth sneaking up behind you – research shows humans also enjoyed hearing for pleasure pretty much since they crawled out of the primordial soup. Music isn’t essential for human evolution or continued survival as a species, yet every people on Earth, at every point in history, have created their own form of music.
In fact, if you want to develop your sense of hearing, music makes for a pretty intuitive entry point – after all, most people can name at least a handful of songs and musicians that speak to them, even if they don’t call themselves audiophiles. Here’s an idea: create an “audio apothecary.” This is a playlist with songs that work like remedies: songs to cheer you up, songs to relax you, and songs that make you feel less alone. Compile this apothecary with no regard for taste or fashion – these songs are just for you.
Attend concerts when you can, whether they’re stadium spectacles or free jazz in the park. Tune into an unfamiliar radio station, or pick a genre you’re unfamiliar with, like bluegrass or acid house, and spend an afternoon getting better acquainted with it. Let these auditory explorations spur you on to ever more experimental adventures in hearing, like a sound bath. Equally, attend to small, underappreciated sounds: the fizz of an aspirin or the rumble of traffic.
Don’t just listen for sounds – listen for silence, too. Many people live in environments where they’re surrounded by noise. Becoming alert to sound makes you more alert to spells of silence. Appreciate silence when you encounter it, and try to seek it out. Resist the urge to put headphones on and turn on a podcast. Silence, you’ll soon learn, is refreshing and replenishing. It offers not just a reprieve from sound; it’s a space where you can be alone with your own thoughts and a door through which new ideas can enter. The saying goes that silence is golden but the truth is, silence is a much rarer and more precious commodity.
Stop and smell the roses
Try eating a strawberry jellybean while you’re holding your nose and you’ll be surprised at how little of that strawberry flavor you actually taste. The tastebuds on your tongue only register the key taste groups, like sour or bitter. With your nose plugged, all you get of that jellybean’s flavor is a big dose of “sweet.” But try again with your nose unplugged and you’ll taste every facet of that red, juicy, sugary strawberry flavor. And that’s what your sense of smell does – it’s a sense that brings everything alive and into sharper focus.
For the Onge people of the Andaman Islands, smell is such an integral part of life that they structure their calendar around what smells are prevalent on the islands at different times. In other cultures, smell is more of an afterthought. But it shouldn’t be! Here are a few tasks that will help hone your sense of smell.
Educate your nose. Take the time to savor the notes of a perfume, identify the smell of a hand soap, deeply sniff the bouquet of your evening glass of wine or your morning cup of coffee. To take things up a notch, try a wine appreciation class or a perfumery course. A budget-friendly option is to take a few household goods – spices, toiletries, condiments – and perform a blindfolded smell test with a friend. How many smells can you identify?
While you may be very specific about the aesthetics of your spaces, when it comes to other sensory dimensions, like smell, you’re probably far more passive. Shape the smell of your house to please you with scented candles, fresh-cut herbs and flowers, and beautifully fragranced toiletries. Eliminate scents you don’t like – baking soda works wonders on smelly shoes and kitchen cupboards. And if you hate artificial smells, switch to unscented household products and cleaners.
Find your signature. Sniff your way through a perfume store, trying to determine which fragrance family feels most like “you.” Wear it every day, and you’ll soon develop associations around that scent – a true signature fragrance can become inextricably linked with your life’s story. Andy Warhol famously wore the same perfume every day over a three-month period. After three months were up, he’d switch to another perfume. Later, when he wanted to evoke memories of any specific period in his life, he only needed to smell the perfume he was wearing at the time.
Anchor yourself in the present. Smell is fleeting. You can’t stockpile it and save it for later. The upside of its transient nature means that it can connect you to the present moment perhaps more effectively than any of your other senses. When you want to feel anchored in the moment you’re in, take a deep, appreciative sniff – there’s no quicker shortcut to situating yourself in the here and now.
Enjoyment is all a matter of taste
“Tell me what you eat,” said the legendary nineteenth-century food critic Jean Brillat-Savarin, “and I shall tell you what you are.”
So, what are you?
Are you refined, fastidious, generous, or humble? Could you be more adventurous? Decadent? Discerning?
Expand what you eat, and you expand who you are. Learn to appreciate even the humblest of meals and you deepen your appreciation of all life’s simple pleasures.
Your sense of taste works in symphony with all your other senses. Smell adds dimension to the flavor groups your taste buds detect. The look of a plate of food can make it seem more, or less appetizing. The crunch of salty potato chips or the pop of popcorn being prepared can be enough to make your mouth water. And the feel of food in your mouth – whether it’s a silky chocolate mousse or a crisp stick of celery – has a huge impact on your overall enjoyment of it.
So building up your sense of taste is an exercise in building up all your other senses, too. Here are three easy exercises to expand your sense of taste:
First, find the magic in the familiar. While tastes and taboos vary from one culture’s cuisine to another’s, the tomato is almost universally loved and appreciated for its tart, fresh, slightly herbal taste. And ketchup is one of the world’s most beloved condiments. The bottle of Heinz ketchup you almost certainly have in your kitchen is actually one of the most complex culinary creations you can taste. It actually manages to hit all five of the key taste groups: bitter, salty, sweet, sour, and umami. Why don’t you try tasting a spoonful of ketchup, really paying attention to the flavor profile? This everyday condiment is actually incredibly rich in flavor and aroma. Learning to truly appreciate even mundane tastes will unlock a new world of flavor for you.
Second, try something new. You don’t need to travel to sample unfamiliar dishes and ingredients – though you certainly can! Seek out a restaurant that serves dishes from a culture whose food you’ve never tried before, or a supermarket that stocks produce and ingredients from a new-to-you cuisine. Ask the server or the cashier for their recommendations – or be spontaneous! Choose a dish that speaks to you or a product that catches your eye.
And third, be specific. It’s not enough to say, “I love cheese.” There are countless varieties of cheese to try. Buy a selection, then mindfully taste your way through – you’ll be saying, “I love an aged Gruyère, but goat’s cheese can be too tangy for my taste” in no time.
Center yourself through touch
You see with your eyes, hear with your eyes, smell with your nose, and taste with your tongue – but you touch with your whole body. You register touch through the organ of your skin, which covers your whole body.
Touch brings you, quite literally, closer to others. And this desire for proximity seems to be innate to almost everybody. Studies show that babies who experience plenty of skin-to-skin contact with their primary caregivers put on weight more quickly, sleep more, and cry less. Adults, too, benefit from the experience of being touched. Being touched by another has been shown to lower blood pressure, improve sleep, and prompt the body to release natural painkillers. Socially appropriate forms of touching – like a handshake between newly introduced colleagues, or a warm hug between friends – can build feelings of trust and esteem.
Touch is a potent emotional and social tool. So here are a few exercises designed to help you harness its power.
Let’s start with touch for comfort. Touch can be stimulating – it can make you feel aroused or alert. But it can also be calming and grounding. Small children are comforted by the touch of their favorite stuffed toys or their blankies. You may have outgrown your blankie, but you can still activate the calming properties of touch in stressful situations. Ask yourself what kind of prop you could use to help yourself feel centered: perhaps you could hold onto a clipboard during an important presentation, or cradle a coffee cup in your hands to quell first date jitters.
Or why not take a dip? Immersing yourself in water is a simple way to engage your sense of touch from head to toe. And while you can opt for a flotation tank or a day spa, your humble bathroom has all you need for a refreshing tactile experience. Whether you prefer to shower or bathe, set aside some time to slowly, mindfully register the feel of the water as it envelopes your skin and awakens your senses.
Next, you can hack your brain through embodied cognition. Touch isn’t just a sense, it’s a superpower. Ever heard of embodied cognition? It’s the idea that your body’s physical experiences can actually mold and enhance your thinking. It’s why you might not be able to verbally share your bolognese recipe with someone, but once you’re in the kitchen surrounded by ingredients and utensils you turn out a perfect sauce every time. Think about how you can increase the tactility of your intellectual work – you could write notes longhand with a satisfyingly hefty fountain pen, or memorize a sequence of important facts in time with a yoga flow.
This last tip is simple yet powerful: find a talisman. Find an object small enough to fit in your pocket. It might carry sentimental value; its proportions or texture might be pleasing to your fingertips; it might simply spark joy. Keep this talisman on your person, and whenever you feel overwhelmed or disconnected from your body, activate the centering power of touch simply by running your fingers over this special object.
Final summary
When you unleash the power of your senses, you unlock a richer, more mindful way of life. Whether it’s savoring the taste of your morning coffee, noticing the intricate patterns of a spiderweb on the ceiling, or finding the harmony in the clanking of cutlery at your local cafe, each time you stop to focus on the sensory you come closer to apprehending the infinite beauty of the world around you.