Ten Ways That Sensations Changed My Life
1) For a long time, I proudly identified as a 'head on a stick'. As an overworked, underhealed organizer, I could break down definitions of hegemony on the spot, but couldn’t identify a sensation to save my life. So much of my survival was about being a very quick, very adept thinker. And that way of being was reinforced and celebrated by a lot of the movement cycles that I was involved with. But, as I began to move away from these circles and entered a process of growth and healing, I noticed that this very cognitively based understanding and discernment wasn’t enough to truly change my patterns and broaden my life.
To get nerdy on you, neuroscientists have found that the greatest concentration of neuro synapses — contrary to popular belief — is in your gut, not your brain. Why does this matter? Well, when I started to broaden the information I was relying on and incorporate information from my gut or my ‘second brain’, my healing changed profoundly. Sensations were a key to unlocking levels that I didn’t even know existed!
2) When I have grown my capacity to neither fixate on nor avoid my feelings, be they emotions or physical sensations, it feels like I have more options — particularly ones where I can align my actions with my values.
3) When I’ve relied solely on my cognitive thoughts and interpretations of a situation, particularly a loaded situation, I’ve notice that the time frame for those thoughts is often… slippery. As if transparencies of what’s happened in the past are laid over the present moment, making it unclear what’s *actually* happening right now. When I’ve been able to be with my sensations, I have more tools to discern between the past and the present. I more easily access real-time information about my boundaries, my wants, my needs, etc. Sensations make ‘what is’ much more accessible for me.
4) Simply put, when I avoid my sensations, they don’t go away. Generally they sit around and fester. Or they build and build until they start popping up unannounced in all kinds of ways that don’t take the best care of me. The things that I am most afraid of and most try to avoid have tremendous power over me. When I have practices in my life that encourage acknowledging and leaning into those sensations of fear or avoidance, there is more movement and more change in my life.
5)Grounded accountability; principled conflict; leaning into greater intimacy; sitting with the unknown; being able to show up both for ourselves *and* for others; responding to stresses and hurt from a place of collective liberation — all of these are great ideas that I hold dear. When I have a greater capacity to feel my sensations, these honorable grand concepts can actually become kinesthetic practices that change my relationships and my engagement in community on the daily.
6) Getting to know my sensations has given me a basis from which I can recognize and honor and feel into all the brilliant ways that I have survived up until this point —something my cognitive brain and our dominant culture often disparages — and has also given me a springboard from which I can build brilliant new skills for how I want to live in the here and now.
7) When I feel my sensations and practice leaning into them, I better notice when I'm triggered. When I feel my sensations and practice leaning into them, I can recover from that state. When I feel my sensations and practice leaning into them, I have a lot more
discernment skills to figure out what’s actually happening versus what I think or interpret is happening. When I feel my sensations and practice leaning into them I have myriad options about how I can respond.
8) I have found that life, as a human, on this planet, is a hot mess of brilliance and devastation. When I can be with that complexity and contradiction, I don’t have to constrict myself or uphold binaries that don’t take care of me/us.
9) When I sit with my feelings without having to react out of them, collapse under them, try to get away from them, or spend all my energy wishing they were different, I discover I have tools to open myself up to other humans and myself in liberatory, transformative ways.
10) I have observed and experienced that the work of combating and unlearning oppression (pivotal to building the world I want to live in) requires me to be uncomfortable. That work requires me to have the capacity to make big bold actions. It requires me to have the capacity to make mistakes — and to be accountable for those mistakes. To recognize my mistakes, and then to learn different ways of DOing and BEing. To hang in, and also to speak out. That work requires me to sit with the impact and implications of historic and current-day oppression that I am both implicated in and implicated by. That work requires that I build my capacity to hold onto hope. The cost of not being able to feel uncomfortable in my life has been enormous and far-reaching. Sensation-based practices give me concrete ways to increase my capacity to truly and wholly and sustainably show up for the work in service of liberation.
