This is a practical one.
Our senses are the key to presence. You cannot notice what is happening through your vision, smell, sound, taste, or touch without being present in the moment of experience.
With presence comes satisfaction. Presence brings grounding and safety. High-alert situations may heighten the senses but in real danger it feels sharp and strong. Different from anxious, imagination, story-driven high-alert. That sort of thing is brought back down to earth by tuning into the senses.
You may have heard of the various number drills some use to manage themselves. Something like notice 5 things you can see, 4 you can hear, 3 you can touch, or something like that.
I don’t want management. I’d like you focused on growth and practice through pleasure, that brings you down to earth and keeps you there for longer and longer stretches, until the pleasure of being alive outstrips the amount of time in need of regulation. You’re more regulated.
If allowing yourself pleasure feels difficult for you, I 100% can help with that. 200% even. It’s shaman time.
I have one sort of off-topic but not practical tip to throw at you first, but it’s what initially inspired this newsletter. There’s a woman who goes by Glucose Goddess on Instagram and other places. Her website is here:
https://www.glucosegoddess.com/
She’s all about blood sugar regulation, and one tip she has is about how you eat. If you eat something with vinegar in it before your starch or whatever may spike you and begin a cascade of moodiness or medical condition worry for the rest of your day, the spike is totally different.
She’s always posting stuff like this. This image is linked to her Instagram. There’s other incredibly simple things like ordering your fiber first, etc.
Worth sharing.
For my own experiments I have for you, these are ones I use in every day life frequently that have developed an attunement with myself, greater self-respect, and trust in me and the world at large.
Ready? Here we go.
Taste - take some bites where you are doing nothing besides eating. No scrolling, reading, television, or even talking or paying attention to anything else. Just some bites, sometimes. What happens? Also, try not taking any bites you don’t want to take. I don’t care if you “have just one bite left.” Ask yourself if you actually want it. If not, don’t take it. Don’t force yourself and notice what happens. Wrap up the bite for later.
Smell - do not sniff the flowers. Smell them for 2 or more breaths. This means you will have at least one full cycle of breath, even if you short change the second one, and the experience is miles longer more luxurious than a quick sniff and pull away. Lots of flowers here in San Diego smell like Hawaii. Some smell like nothing, some smell herby, some floral. In NC my favorite things to smell were magnolia blossoms, honeysuckle, and wisteria. Orange tree blossoms in CA are no joke. Unbelievably pleasurable to smell for two breaths. I noticed just today that my breath goes deeper in a different way in my body when smelling a wonderfully-scented flower. I assume that is healing in some way I don’t understand yet. Do this with wildflowers as store-bought ones are often drenched in glyphosate, or go live your life and do whatever you want. As our Lady Katy Bowman would say (inside joke that me and Roxanne are saying bc we reference her wisdom so often), you also get movement snacks in by squatting or changing position to get your schnozz close enough to the flowers to smell them. Make friends with any bees you see. Say hi to them, calmly.
Tuning fork - this is something I taught in the last Bodywork Magic online class and do often for myself, the world, and in sessions. Humming or singing has lots of documentation to it around being beneficial for balancing the vagus nerve, which relaxes the gut-mind connection because information goes both up and down between them via the vagus nerve. Here’s how you do it: Make a sound, literally any sound. Judge it and decide how to make one that’s just a little bit better in that it feels or sounds better to you. Continue playing with sounds, any sounds at all, made by you or by your hands or whatever you like to use to produce sound, until you find one that seems satisfying. Congratulations, you just tuned your surroundings. You know what’s good. You can feel harmony and balance. Alternatively, try this simple exercise someone taught me years ago where you simply try to hear the farthest-away sound that you can. It’s trippy and expands your awareness rapidly.
You can tune into touch and sight however you want, but please do often.
Sessions are often crazy fascinating shamanic journeys, but sometimes they’re really practical life coaching stuff.
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