Aloha!
Last month, we explored how words expand our spiritual experiences. The next logical step is to use our feelings and senses to expand our spiritual experiences.
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Exploring Senses
We have more than 5 senses. Wikipedia lists over 25 physical senses.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sense
Yet, this only lists physical senses. We are Body, Mind, and Spirit, which means we have senses for body, mind, and spirit. I teach that we have 25 senses for each aspect of our life, which means we have over 75 senses to use! Yet, almost everyone focuses only on the physical aspects of the five primary senses. Many people stumble through life quite blindly.
Senses are what we use to detect boundaries and potentials.
Creating Senses
4 Initial Lessons
- Anything that pushes us to an edge can be used as a sense.
- Anything that triggers us can be used as a sense.
- Senses of the mind are used to navigate our stories and social world.
- Senses of spirit are used to navigate the nonphysical world and feel our connections and flow of life.
Anything that creates a feeling can also be used to measure whatever triggered the feeling. If something touches you, you are touching it back!
For example, I can sense peanuts from my peanut allergy. I have a trigger in my lungs. The trigger is that I feel a spark of pain or “pinch” 1 inch below my collarbone when I am around peanuts. When I feel that pinch, I have trained myself to stop, pause, look around, identify where the peanuts are, and then move away from the peanuts. All from a pinching feeling that is the physical trigger. Many people ignore negative triggers or feelings like this when, in fact, we should use them to create a sense that alerts us of the problems we need to avoid. So now I have a “peanut sense” to help navigate around my peanut allergy.
While this last example uses a physical sensation from my body reacting to a peanut, we can also feel stories, emotions, and other things like frustration, which all can be used to build our senses in life.
It is easier to use negative feelings than positive feelings in making a sense. Usually, with a negative feeling, your action is one to release and back off from something.
For example, many people feel anger, anxiety, and frustration. These feelings trigger a person. The energy pushes a person out of their comfort zone, and then they REACT out of survival. In reaction, instincts take over, and a person tumbles into conflict.
(Kendall playing out angst in the sand on vacation)
Now let’s do the following, when these feelings bubble up:
- Pause.
- Acknowledge what you are feeling.
- Trace out the connections in play.
- Examine what is triggering you.
- Feel out options (often times releasing the problem)
- Choose the option that moves you around the conflict.
With practice, these six steps can all be done in a heartbeat. At first, it is awkward and takes longer. The practice eventually turns you into a social ninja who can navigate any social situation.
For example, I just paused in my boredom. When tracing out connections I realized I didn’t feel connections. This means, the solution is to first create a conscious connection to something. It could be as simple as connecting to my breath.
Joyful Senses
What is Joy?
It’s a connection to happiness, a deep feeling of contentment, and it’s much more than a feeling.
We could talk a long time about joy! Generally, it’s an expansive energy that uplifts us!
Next Time You Feel Joy:
Take a moment while in joy and use that “feeling” to also sense the world through the feeling. Use the moment of joy as a connection to something bigger.
Joy may create a feeling of connection. So, at first, feel the connection, and then turn it around into an action. For example, you can reach out to what is causing the joy and return some love. In that moment of reaction, you have just turned it around to also be a sense, just through the interaction with the source of joy.
Since spirit represents connection, if you reach out to connect more, you then reinforce spirit. So if you reach out in Joy, you are using Joy as a spiritual sense to navigate the connections in your life.
In the first post picture, you can see Mina and myself interacting with each other in Joy. Yet, if you look more closely, you can see us interacting with Julie taking our picture. You don’t see Julie in the picture, but you can see her with the Joy of Mina’s smile looking back at her.
This is an example of how to expand a feeling into a sensing experience —> something that took me decades to discover and refine. Yes, practicing this will take you some time. Yet, every time you feel joy, take the extra moment to celebrate and sense the connections within that joy. You will discover spirit, love, connection, meaning, and so much more. All you need to do is flow within the joy and play.
Now, in playing with joy, you will expand it and discover new paths in your life. “Tao” is the path one walks in life, so you will also reveal an expanded meaning of Tao.
I just gave you the key to decades of teachings by simply living life. Expand this to any feeling: happiness, boredom, sadness, rage, love —> all feelings can help you explore life. We can use positive feelings to navigate challenging moments of life with hope, while we can use negative feelings to find solutions or prevent problems. For instance, you can use the sense of “sadness” to navigate a difficult situation and minimize or prevent loss.
Spiritual Senses
The problem with spirit is that most people don’t understand spirit. Worse, western culture teaches people to be blind to spirit. If you are blind to something, by definition, you can’t sense or react to that something. If you feel something doesn’t exist, you can’t see that something.
So let’s affirm spirit is very real. Let’s focus on the second definition of spirit: spirit represents the connections in our life.
Remember anything that connects us to something else in life can be used as a baseline to create a spiritual sense.
Joy, by definition, means a deep feeling of elation through a moment of connection. It’s a spiritual sense alerting you to a connection! Most people only use joy to feel the happiness in the moment. If you turn the feeling around, you can also explore life with joy!
In this picture of Mina, you can see the joy coming from all the connections of family and friends.
A Lei represents love, friendship, celebration and so much more. Each Lei is connecting out to others and you can feel the weight of joy in the connections.
Using Joy as a Spiritual Sense:
Take a moment while in joy, then use that feeling to sense the world. Use the moment of joy as a connection to something bigger.
When these feelings bubble up:
- Pause.
- Acknowledge what you are feeling – Joy
- Realize joy represents connections and trace out the connections
- As you trace each connection, respond with gratitude and send that energy back out to share and strengthen the love
- Feel anything that is disrupting the joy, and then smooth out the problem
- Repeat the loop
In approaching Joy as a sense, you can reach out and improve the connections around you. It also gives you a chance to resolve out drama or conflicts before they happen.
When you use a spiritual sense in this manner it does the following three things:
- Allows you to smooth out the flows in your life. In others words you will become lucky.
- Deepens the connections of your life. Friendships and family become deeper.
- You will see hidden moments of life you would have missed in the rush of being physical.
Lets use the example of walking the morning dew and using your spiritual senses or not.
(Ignoring the spiritual sense)
Walking in morning dew and then complaining your feet are cold and wet.
-or-
(Tapping into the connections of that simple moment of movement)
Seeing in the morning dew, a million sparks of color and the waking life within the grass shining in the morning sun.
Each the same moment, but honestly which one is the one you want to live within? Once you begin tapping into your spiritual senses, it changes the world around you because you can see so much more of the world around you.
Look into the morning dew
Finding a soul’s shape
Reflected in your footsteps
-Casey Kochmer
Add comments on what new senses you would like to explore. For instance, who wants to learn more on how to turn joy from being just a feeling and into a sense?
I will leave you with the song “More than a Feeling” to close this off
Here are some additional videos about exploring the senses.
Potential – Sensing & Working with What Might Be
Working with Pain
Personal Energy #3 – Senses
Taoism 101 Class – Session 4 Crystal Space and Senses
Questions
As you might have noticed, many of our newsletters are about answering questions sent our way.
Please ask questions as Julie and I will do our best to teach against those questions.
Cheers
Much Love Dragons.
& See you soon!
The video for the class can be watched here:
Expanding One’s Senses Video For this Newsletter
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