You know the basic senses: sight, smell, taste, touch and hearing. But other senses are processed in the brain; proprioception and kinesthesia (where your body parts are and what they’re doing). nociception (feeling pain), thermoception (sensing temperature), chronoception (sensing the passage of time) and interoception (internal needs, such as hunger and thirst).
The kinesthetic sense tells you about your body: it’s position and its size and whether it’s moving and, if so, where and how.
Let’s do a simple experiment. Put a hand over your head where you can’t see it. Notice that you know right where the hand is, though you are not doing anything we ordinarily call sensing. Notice that you could describe in detail your hand’s position. You could say how the fingers relate to each other and to the palm, where the hand is in relation to your head or to the floor or whether there is a bend at the wrist. Now wiggle your fingers. Notice how much you know about the wiggling. You could say when you started, when you stopped, the speed, the sequence, whether the palm was involved, what joints were moving. Now imagine that your little finger grew four inches. Notice that if that were to happen you would know it from the inside. You would not need to look.
Notice something else before you bring your hand down. Look at your hand and notice that as you begin to use your eyes as your main source of information, that inner sense of its location fades. Now do the same experiment with your tactile sense—no longer look at your hand, but instead reach up and feel it with your other hand. Notice how you begin to rely on your second hand to tell you where the first one is.
So, working with me, if you do not already have it, we develop the ability to bring body feeling into consciousness in a comfortable, ongoing way. Most people experience this as a kind of coming home. There is a relief in it, in becoming embodied again. It turns out the effort is not in feeling our bodies but in not feeling them.
We live in a kind of sensory soup. There is a richness in this that is homey and gratifying for most of us. It’s essential for Artists. Artists with a reduced consciousness live their professional lives with a serious handicap. I believe we are all artists in some form or another.
This post was inspired by Barbara Conable’s book, How to learn the Alexander Technique and Sanjay Gupta’s book, Keep Sharp: Build a Better Brain at Any Age.