Come to Your Senses

Accepting our physical sensations--whether pleasant or not--is one of the most challenging and liberating of practices.

By Tara Brach

We experience our lives through our bodies, whether we are aware of it or not. Yet we are usually so mesmerized by our ideas about the world that we miss out on much of our direct sensory experience. Even when we are aware of feeling a strong breeze, the sound of rain on the roof, a fragrance in the air, we rarely remain with the experience long enough to inhabit it fully. In most moments, an overlay of inner dialogue comments on what is happening and plans what we might do next. We might greet a friend with a hug, but our moments of physical contact become blurred by our computations about how long to embrace or what we're going to say when we're done. We rush through the hug, not fully present.

Many people are so accustomed to being out of touch with the body that they live entirely in a mental world. The fact that the body and mind are interconnected might even be hard for them to believe. Unless feelings are painfully intrusive or, as with sex, extremely pleasant or intense, physical sensations can seem elusive and be difficult to recognize. Often we are in a trance--only partially present to our experience of the moment.

Over the Waterfall

The buddha called our persistent emotional and mental reactivity "the waterfall," because we are so easily carried away from the experience of the present moment by its compelling force. Both Buddhist and Western psychologies tell us how this happens: The mind instantly and unconsciously assesses whatever we experience as pleasant, unpleasant, or neutral. When pleasant sensations arise, our reflex is to grasp after them and try to hold on to them. We often do this through planning, and with the emotional energies of excitement and yearning. When we experience unpleasant sensations, we contract, trying to avoid them. Again, the process is the same--we worry and strategize; we feel fear, irritation. Neutral is our signal to disengage and turn our attention elsewhere, which usually means to an experience that is more intense or stimulating.

All of these reactions--to people, to situations, to thoughts in our minds--are actually reactions to the kinds of sensations that are arising in the body. When we become riveted on someone's ineptness and are bursting with impatience, we are reacting to our own unpleasant sensations; when we are attracted to someone and filled with longing and fantasy, we are reacting to pleasant sensations. Our entire swirl of reactive thoughts, emotions, and behaviors springs from this ground of sensations. When these sensations are unrecognized, our lives are lost in the waterfall of reactivity--we disconnect from living presence, from full awareness, from our hearts.

In order to awaken from this trance, the Buddha recommended "mindfulness centered on the body." In fact, he called physical sensations the first foundation of mindfulness, because they are intrinsic to feelings and thoughts and are the base of the very process of consciousness. Because our pleasant or unpleasant sensations so quickly trigger a chain reaction of emotions and mental stories, a central part of our training is to recognize the arising of thoughts and return over and over to our immediate sensory experience. We might feel discomfort in the lower back and hear a worried inner voice saying, "How long will this last? How can I make it go away?" Or we might feel a pleasant tingling, a relaxed openness in the chest, and eagerly wonder, "What did I do to arrive in this state? I hope I can do that again."

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