Hello, I’m going to share a practice for coming into the present moment. This is a Five Senses Meditation.
Our sense perceptions take place in the moment, in the very present moment. When we think about them, our thinking can be slightly behind, so we can interpret and label our sense perceptions, but the thinking is a different faculty of our consciousness. ‘Sensing’ takes place in the now, and as we give it more attention, it becomes stronger. We become more present.
Our thinking goes quieter. So, I learnt this from a friend of mine who’d lived with the Hopi Indians, and she said they practised every day each sense, they spent five minutes in turn.
Today we’re going to spend two minutes with each sense, and the first one is hearing.
So I want you to take a deep breath and drop into your body. Notice your body on the chair or the floor, and give attention to your hearing, notice all the sounds. Your brain will want to label the sounds and tell you what they are, but just give them attention as if you were listening to music.
And see how many different sounds you can hear. And also listen to the silence, the background silence in which the sounds occur. If there wasn’t any silence, there wouldn’t be any sound.
Now we’re going to shift and give attention to our sense of touch.
I suggest using your fingers, fingertips, to give attention to touch. You can use any part of your body, but I recommend the fingertips very sensitive, and you can touch your body, the furniture, the floor, anything, but just give attention to the sensation of touch for two minutes. Noticing the tactile sensation, touch sensation, letting go of the thinking or labelling. Bring your attention back to touch.
Just enjoy giving attention to what you’re touching.
Now we’re going to shift again to the sense of smell.
Now you can bring things up to your nose, or bring your nose down to other things. Can smell your hand, and smell the plants, the things around you, or you can smell something that is intended to to smell, like this bouquet. And again, keep bringing your attention back to that sense.
Again, just the sensation, just touch life. through your sense of smell, without interpreting, without saying nice smell, bad smell, like this, don’t like that. Just, just be with the smell.
And now we’re going to change once again to the sense of taste.
So you’ll need a small morsel of food to put in your mouth, but don’t think of this as eating. This is tasting. I’m going to spend two minutes with this piece of food in our mouth. If your attention wanders, let it go. Let go of the thinking. Bring it back to the sense of taste.
And now you can allow your eyes to open. We’re going to work with the sense of sight.
So when you’re taking in the sense of sight, you can be looking at the whole field of vision. So my eyes are pointing at a blade of grass here, but I can also see my hands at the periphery of my vision, I can see movement around me.
I’m taking in all the colours, the shapes, the forms, allowing everything in my field of vision to come in and touch me in the moment.
And allowing yourself to come into deep stillness.
This giving attention to the peripheral vision it connects with a deeper part of our consciousness than just moving our eyes where they’re pointing and giving all our thinking to that, it enables us to drop and connect with a deeper part of ourselves.
So this is the Five Senses Meditation. We can do this every day, or we can just choose one sense at a time during our day.
For example, in the middle of a busy day, when we’ve got a lot of thinking to do, can just take our mobile phone and, rather than looking at it and the information it contains. Just notice how it feels in your hand, the weight, the smoothness.
So, this is a powerful way of training our consciousness to be present, to drop into present moment awareness, and to really enjoy the present moment, the vital aliveness of each moment, rather than being lost in thought all the time.
Thank you so much for watching.
