A while ago during practice it occurred to me that maybe there is only one real sense: touch.
Sight is light touching your body.
Hearing is sound waves touching your ears.
Smell is something gaseous touching your nose.
Taste is food/something else touching your tongue.
Touch itself is something you can, well, feel excluding the above touching your body anywhere.
They are each progressively intimate, too (though, not necessarily).
Think of the typical process of meeting another person for the first time. You see them first; then you listen to them; you might find them appealing by their smell; maybe you kiss them; then, well, the rest is history.
Of course, while touch can be sexual it isn’t necessarily so, but you certainly need to have a conversation about feeling-touch in a way you don’t need to about sight-touch.
This schema also leads me to the idea of senses being concentric circles. Touch is at the centre, right at your very physical being, and the senses expand outwards to sight… you know how you can tell someone is looking at you from a distance as a very light weight? This allows space for more circles we just don’t know about yet, maybe a sixth sense, if you like, however you might want to define that. I think I would define it as just being able to feel someone else’s energy or presence nearby.
Which brings me to two quite different but related things.
One is about energy healing. I’ve never had reiki, but have generally been sceptical about it. (But mainly, why waste an hour just sitting there when you could be having a massage 🤣?) But this week a friend I met at the yoga studio offered to give me a pellowah session — it’s a kind of reiki derivative.
I won’t write too much here but the main takeaway for me was the power of someone just quietly being with you. You can say what you like about healing potential, but I don’t think you can argue that the feeling of being alone in a room is different to being in a room with someone else, even when your eyes are closed. And that brings with it a whole lot of questions.
The other is about adjustments in yoga classes and feel-touch versus hearing-touch.
I met a core power teacher the other day and we got talking about adjustments. I had just been thinking that I feel like I need to learn to adjust more, but I don’t have the knowledge on how to do this properly yet.
But this teacher spoke about how he’s stopped giving adjustments now. He treats it as a challenge to try to get someone to do what you want them to do without using touch, just your verbal descriptions. Even if you ask someone to give you a wave away if they don’t want to be touched during a class, he pointed out, maybe they don’t want to give you a wave away because they feel too self-conscious about doing so.
I have had some powerful and useful adjustments and I love getting them. But I have also had probably more power and more useful adjustments just by someone telling me how to do something differently or pointing out something I’m doing wrong using their words. It’s almost like the Socratic method of learning, but for your body. If someone just adjusts you, you don’t quite remember as well as if you adjust yourself by going internally and shifting things.
Yoga drunk series #243: Divine vs profane
The other day I was in rabbit, and suddenly started thinking about how the energy is circular in this pose but it also pushes downwards and outwards and I was wondering where the source of the energy, therefore, actually is. And the source of the energy has to be a single point, but where is the point? Indeed where is the source of energy that started the universe, and OMG WHAT IF THEY ARE THE SAME STARTING POINTS and here I am, in rabbit, sweating, full of the power to birth a universe but also a universe myself and
The guy in front of me one to the right is mouth breathing goddamnit and why doesn’t the teacher tell him to seal his damn lips so we don’t have to listen to him and
A multitude of universes are cascading within, a veritable Russian doll universe, with no beginning and no end, all from this single point in time, but moving forward and backward in time, and what even is a point, it doesn’t exist really, it’s just an idea, so do I exist? Am I just an idea? Does this breath and
There he was again, sucking in the air through his OPEN MOUTH so we all had to listen to the hiss as he shifted his hips higher, I suppose, I couldn’t see him I could only hear his loud breathing, the only twit not apparently able to realise his mouth should be closed and