The Sense of Touch
Published: Sun, 07/04/10
Dear ,
Here is the first message on the Twelve Senses.
Following the message, I have also included two brief descriptions of the work of Inner Summer.
- Intimacy Intensive Teleseminar for those struggling with the mysteries of relationship beginning next week.
- Lifting the Veils Biography Program for those of you who are caring for children under the age of 7 beginning next week.
- A thought for Independence Day!
Touch is the first of the Twelve Senses...
The Twelve Senses are composed of three groups of four. The first group of four, the Incarnation Senses, give us the sense of our existence within our skin. The second group, the Participation Senses, allow us to perceive the world outside ourselves. The third group, the Love Senses, allow us to know other human beings.
How we perceive ourselves, the world and others shapes how we relate, engage, recollect and respond to everything. Our senses are the earthly gateway to consciousness and to our feelings.
If we examine our senses, we come to our senses. Beginning with this message, once a week I will share some thoughts on a sense and ask you some questions to help you begin to see the role each sense plays in your life. As a result, when we reach the Autumnal Equinox, you will be more attuned to each of the senses and you will know yourself better, much better. You will have a new sense of yourself from twelve points of view.
Let's touch on the sense of touch and the gifts of resistance.
Through touch we perceive that we are separate from everything else in the world that we are alone inside our skin. We experience the "other," the "not self," through touch.
Through touch we experience resistance. Something stops us, pushes back on us, tells us that space is occupied by other objects. Touch tells us we are a "self." Touch gives us the recognition of our limits and our boundaries. Eventually, it wakens us to being someone and something and to being interested in another one and other things.
Most of us find resistance annoying, even threatening. But resistance really affirms our own existence while demanding that we pay attention to and live within our limitations and our boundaries.
My feet touch (perceive the resistance of) the earth. The earth's resistance is experienced in my soul as an affirmation that I can stand up by myself and for myself. The resistance my thoughts feel when they touch the contradictions of another's thoughts tells me I need to question and confirm the reality of my thinking. The resistance of another's feelings asks me to notice my motives and my intentions.
How we perceive ourselves, the world and others shapes how we relate, engage, recollect and respond to everything. Our senses are the earthly gateway to consciousness and to our feelings.
If we examine our senses, we come to our senses. Beginning with this message, once a week I will share some thoughts on a sense and ask you some questions to help you begin to see the role each sense plays in your life. As a result, when we reach the Autumnal Equinox, you will be more attuned to each of the senses and you will know yourself better, much better. You will have a new sense of yourself from twelve points of view.
Let's touch on the sense of touch and the gifts of resistance.
Through touch we perceive that we are separate from everything else in the world that we are alone inside our skin. We experience the "other," the "not self," through touch.
Through touch we experience resistance. Something stops us, pushes back on us, tells us that space is occupied by other objects. Touch tells us we are a "self." Touch gives us the recognition of our limits and our boundaries. Eventually, it wakens us to being someone and something and to being interested in another one and other things.
Most of us find resistance annoying, even threatening. But resistance really affirms our own existence while demanding that we pay attention to and live within our limitations and our boundaries.
My feet touch (perceive the resistance of) the earth. The earth's resistance is experienced in my soul as an affirmation that I can stand up by myself and for myself. The resistance my thoughts feel when they touch the contradictions of another's thoughts tells me I need to question and confirm the reality of my thinking. The resistance of another's feelings asks me to notice my motives and my intentions.
Reflections on Touch
This week focus on the mystery of the sense of touch and how your soul perceives otherness. Before you go to bed each night, recall one thought you touched through reading or listening. What did the touch of that thought, the resistance of that thought, wake up in you? Today, what feelings in someone you are close to resisted your feelings about yourself? Did you use that resistance to go more deeply into your emotions and your ideals? And in your will to do something, begin something, complete something, did you meet resistance? Did this resistance strengthen or weaken the resolve living within your boundaries? How can you change your relationship to resistance in your soul?
Touch bears a paradox. It wakens you to yourself in a deep way. It wakens you to the other in a surface way. It is the senses of love (hearing, word, thought and "I" senses) that let you experience what lives deeply in another.
Touch tells you you have reached the periphery of yourself and pushes you back to the center of your self-awareness. How do you experience your periphery? Your center?
In reading this message, you are touching my thoughts. What resistance do you experience? Or is touching my thoughts giving you a sense that the boundaries of your ideas about the senses are expanding and giving you a richer sense of the core of your being?
A Making Sense Journal
I encourage you to keep a journal for your Twelve Senses reflections and explorations. I like using a binder with twelve dividers. This allows you to collect your thoughts, imaginations, print outs from web wanderings, artistic work and so on. You can also print out the messages and keep them in the binder for reference. A regular journal is fine, too. The more time, attention and activity you give to the Twelve Senses (and all other Inner Year work) the more you will benefit.
Self-reflection is a spiritual practice and offers practical benefits. You will find yourself living a richer and more effective life.
The Intimacy Intensive
Finding the Courage and the Compassion to
Know and Being Known
Life is a schooling for intimacy and most of us are flunking out and repeating the introductory courses over and over. Why?
Intimate relationships are a big risk. They ask us to be transparent and vulnerable. They ask us to tell the truth and hear the truth. They ask us to connect with others but from a place of not needing or depending. They ask us to be creative and not conform even to our own fantasies. They ask us to trust and to forgive.
But most of us surround ourselves with a shield of impenetrable defenses. Tell partial-truths and invite partial lies. We connect out of deep neediness seeking to fulfill personal fantasy and conforming to familial and cultural expectations. We are not confident enough in ourselves to truly trust another and unresolved ancient wounds make it impossible to truly forgive new ones.
Yes, it sounds harsh and makes us sad to compare the ideal with the shadowy reality. Focusing on intimacy for four weeks will not be a magic wand turning our capacities for intimacy into happily ever after but it will open a path and take us a step or two closer to something well-worth our struggles.
The Inner Year Intimacy Intensive gently evokes a new consciousness around relationships. Consciousness enlightens like an inner sun. In the light we can find our way. Intimacy is a difficult and challenging journey. It is much easier to stay on the path in the light of insight, confidence and compassion, than in the darkness of unconscious instincts, blind assumptions and selfish expectations.
Intimate relationships are a big risk. They ask us to be transparent and vulnerable. They ask us to tell the truth and hear the truth. They ask us to connect with others but from a place of not needing or depending. They ask us to be creative and not conform even to our own fantasies. They ask us to trust and to forgive.
But most of us surround ourselves with a shield of impenetrable defenses. Tell partial-truths and invite partial lies. We connect out of deep neediness seeking to fulfill personal fantasy and conforming to familial and cultural expectations. We are not confident enough in ourselves to truly trust another and unresolved ancient wounds make it impossible to truly forgive new ones.
Yes, it sounds harsh and makes us sad to compare the ideal with the shadowy reality. Focusing on intimacy for four weeks will not be a magic wand turning our capacities for intimacy into happily ever after but it will open a path and take us a step or two closer to something well-worth our struggles.
The Inner Year Intimacy Intensive gently evokes a new consciousness around relationships. Consciousness enlightens like an inner sun. In the light we can find our way. Intimacy is a difficult and challenging journey. It is much easier to stay on the path in the light of insight, confidence and compassion, than in the darkness of unconscious instincts, blind assumptions and selfish expectations.
LIFTING THE VEILS
of Your Childhood Memories
Our young children need us - their parents, grandparents, teachers and caregivers - to take a knowledge of child development and a sensitivity to their own special, unique needs and capacities and love them, teach them, nurture them, protect them and encourage them.
This is a very big responsibility on practical, emotional and spiritual levels. It is up to us to do everything we can to see the young child in front of us. Our heart, our intelligence, our intention, every part of our caring reaches out to our children. We want to give them our very best.
Yet, we find ourselves feeling moments and levels of anxiety, resentment, annoyance, doubt, confusion and other uncomfortable feelings. Why?
Most of the reasons behind our feelings come from our own childhoods. From conscious and unconscious memories.
Lifting the Veils Part One is an Inner Life Biography program that focuses on recollecting, revealing, and resolving our personal biographies from birth to age 7. Participants lift the veils of their memories allowing them to see clearly and freely the child in front of them. The wisdom of Lifting the Veils is found in the teachings of Rudolf Steiner and the picture of human development he presented and on which he based the Waldorf School curriculum.
As far as I know, Lynn is one of the most experienced guides for anyone who want to do a deeper journey through their own biography.
Ann Stahl
adjunct faculty and mentor
Sunbridge Institute
Waldorf Early Childhood Teacher Training
Independence Day, 2010
What does independence mean to you? What does dependence mean to
you? Historically, we celebrate the signing of the Declaration of Independence - the claiming of the right to be self-governing. But personally we need to find our own sense of and need for independence? We need to find our own history of dependence - we were all once little children with lives dependent on another's presence and attention.
Given the state of the world and the state of our souls, I now ask you to consider interdependence. Where in your life do you celebrate your active interdependence with others?
Conscious Interdependence is worth a lot of fireworks!
With summer smiles,
Lynn