The Tao of Natural Breathing_ For Health, Well-Being, and Inner Growth - Dennis Lewis [12]
THE WORK OF SENSORY AWARENESS
The term “sensory awareness” first became popular in America in the late 1960s, mainly through the work of Charlotte Selver (who had been giving workshops in America since 1938) and Charles Brooks, two of the pioneers in the human potential movement.11 Their work was concerned in large part with the effort to discover through sensation what is natural in our functioning, and what is conditioned; what opens us to the reality of the present moment, and what closes us. It is, of course, questions such as these—and the answers that we can we experience in our own individual lives—that are crucial to our health, well-being, and inner growth. Enriched by the psychophysical experiments of Esalen Institute, in Big Sur, California, and the entry of various Asian spiritual traditions into America in the 1960s and 1970s—especially traditions such as Zen Buddhism, Tibetan Buddhism, and Taoism—the work of sensory awareness demonstrated a new, more fundamental way of relating to ourselves and our energies.
Though the work of sensory awareness begins with our inner and outer senses, it reaches far beyond them into the very meaning of consciousness. Anyone who seriously undertakes this work will quickly discover two remarkable facts. First, that we generally live our lives in a state of “somatic amnesia”—a state in which we are mostly oblivious to the rich, informative sensation of our bodies. What awareness we do have of our bodies is not only filled with enormous gaps, but is often just plain wrong, as physical therapists, body workers, and others are quick to point out. Second, that this somatic amnesia is closely related to our “emotional amnesia,” our frequent inability to feel the emotions and attitudes that are actually motivating our behavior. The gaps in the overall sensation of our bodies are not merely gaps in our bodily awareness; they also represent gaps in our mental and emotional awareness.
As a result of our lack of “integral awareness,” awareness that encompasses our entire being, we have lost touch not only with the gracefulness in action that is our birthright, but, even more importantly, with the extraordinary capabilities of the human organism to sense itself from the inside and to learn new and better ways of functioning through this sensation. Even many of us involved in physical fitness and martial arts have little conscious contact with our bodies, approaching them not through ever-deepening organic awareness but rather through memory, willfulness, coercion, and repetition. The slogan “no pain, no gain” is an extreme example of this approach.
THE WORLD IN THE BODY
From the perspective of Taoism, as well as of Chinese medicine, this lack of integral awareness is harmful to our health. It also deprives us of the vision, the perspective, we need for psychological or spiritual evolution. For the Taoist, the statement “as above, so below” is one of the fundamental truths of life. The body (including the brain) is a microcosm of the universe, and operates under the same laws. Not only is the body “in the world,” but the world is “in the body”—especially the conscious body. For those who can be sensitive, who can learn how to sense themselves impartially, the rich landscape of the outer world—the rivers, lakes, oceans, tides, fields, mountains, deserts, caves, forests, and so on—has direct counterparts in the inner world of the body. The energetic and material qualities of the outer world—represented in Taoism by “the five elements”: fire, earth, metal, water, and wood—manifest in the body as the network of primary organs: the heart, spleen, lungs, kidneys, and liver. And the atmospheric movements of matter and energy that we call “weather”—wind, rain, storm, warmth, cold, dampness, dryness, and so on—have their obvious counterparts in the inner atmosphere of our emotions. Likewise, the cosmic metabolism of the outer world—the