By Damien Rider
This process simulates or mimics your ideal outcome to how you would want to be able to handle stress in your life with heightened sensory perception.
We’re going to talk more about how the senses stimulate the mind and how the simulation that occurs is supporting your goal of living a more progressive, healthy life.
How The Senses Stimulate The Mind
“The human capacity for burden is like bamboo – far more flexible than you’d ever believe at first glance.”
–Jodi Picoult
The brain is designed to help us perceive and understand the world around us. From the time we are babies, we begin using the six senses (sight, touch, hear, smell, taste, and space) to help us gain data on our world.
Similar to breathing, these senses have involuntary and voluntary elements. The fact that you can use all of these senses is involuntary. You also intake information involuntarily all the time due to the environment and others around you, but you can also choose to use your senses… for example: maybe you light a candle to see and smell something warm and comforting in your home or you love the texture of your favorite sweater, so you put it on.
We began with the conscious breath and connecting to ourselves. We observe how the breath feels. Then, we begin to add in the elements, one at a time… you’ve noticed that while doing this, you begin widening the function and connection of sight, touch, sound and space.
Before you know it, you’re using the techniques all day long and can feel more present and grounded, instead of over stimulated. You taste and savor your food. You really listen to what you hear in conversations. You notice and see things in your environment you’ve never taken the time to appreciate, and so on. Altering your feeling of complacent to discovery, just as when we are babies taking in the new sensations.
By connecting to each of the senses individually with a calm breath, your mind can emotionally reprocess your association with each of the senses and your experience of them.
The Importance of Sensory Stimulation and Simulation
Why is it important to reprocess our association with senses?
This has to do with your subconscious mind and behaviors. The senses and memories you have attached to them using the data you’ve been collecting and storing in your mind your entire life drives many of your behaviors.
The sight of the ocean is calming to some people and scary to others depending on their perception. The smell of a home- cooked meal may remind you of your grandmother’s kitchen or an exotic far away land depending on your identity and experiences. Maybe an airplane ride is a terrifying thought for you and a leisurely convenience for others, or fireworks are a beautiful sight to your children and a sleepless, hypervigilant night to you.
Involuntarily, happy memories and triggers alike are mimicked through sensory input. When that sensory input occurs, the subconscious part of your brain can stop being present and instead have the exact same chemical responses that you did at the time of a memory. If that memory is distressing or upsetting, then even if you don’t consciously realize it, your mood will shift, and your behavior can be altered.
In life, we simply can’t avoid all our triggers. We can’t hide from the world and limit our capacity to achieve. Instead, we have to face them and find a way to move forward with calm- focus and confidence. Those desires may be what brought you to this book in the first place.
Through your reprocessing, your mind begins to unlearn old habits and beliefs that no longer serve you. Maybe they once kept you safe or could be used as a coping mechanism, but now your mind is ready to be free and move on, clearing way for new experiences and memories.
With the breath, elements, senses, progressive movement, and your daily life, every part of your senses are being stimulated, and reprocessing is occurring down to the subconscious level so that you can find freedom and inner peace.
