Tuesday, November 18, 2025

Tuesday, November 18, 2025

Here’s to enhancing our six senses!
Seeing:
To sharpen your sense of sight observe art and witness nature. Begin to appreciate the world around you as if you are seeing it for the first time. When you encounter beauty in nature or view a great work of art, it excites not only your sense of sight but also all other senses. However, it takes time and self-training to be able to derive this level of sensory delight from viewing.

Hearing:
Enhance your sense of hearing. Listening to a favorite piece of music is the highest kind of hearing. Music restores order and reduces mental atrophy. A music lover absorbed in listening can feel one with the music. The two become one. The feeling of oneness stops time. 
Similar to practicing solo, listening to live music performance with an audience you feel “collective effervescence,” an aesthetic energy that throbs in the heart of each listener. Such an energy is at the root of the pleasure derived from meditating or enjoying music with a group.

Taste and Smell
Delight in culinary experience! Eating is potentially a rich source of enjoyment as it indulges not one but two senses: taste and smell. A tasty dish can change a frown into a smile.

If the person who cooks in your home makes delicious meals, the quality of your daily life is pleasurable. If that is not so, you can occasionally treat yourself at a favorite restaurant. You wouldn’t want to make do with listening to a poorly tuned instrument when you have the option of listening to a great concert. Make the same choice for meals.

It used to be considered decadent to make too much fuss over a meal. But now we have gourmet food journals, popular television shows, and “foodies” and wine lovers who take the pleasures of the palate seriously. By doing so they expand their sensuous experience of taste and smell. So can you!

Touch
Become attuned to your tactile sense. We use touch constantly because we use our hands for everything we do. But most of the time we’re unaware of our sense of touch. For instance, I was not sensing the tips of my fingers until I wrote the previous sentence. Now I am. I feel more alert.

Now and then remind yourself that “you’re in contact”  or “connected” with whatever you’re touching with your fingers or hands: showering, brushing, dressing, combing, eating, painting, making pottery, knitting, sewing, or doing anything at all! And on your walks, sense the bark of a tree, lush foliage, colorful blossoms so attractive that you can’t but spontaneously touch them with admiration. 

Thinking
Mind is awesome and wondrous, so is thought. But continuous narrative going on in our heads is not. It unnecessarily consumes our life-energy. STOP the film running in your mind hundredth time. PAUSE. Take a few breaths and look around. What do you see, hear, smell? What are you touching? Surrender to whatever is. Choose to be present. 

Make NOW your permanent home. Only visit past or future for practical reasons, for celebratory or for investigative purposes. Then come back to the present moment over and over again.