Giving Sentience a Place by Victoria McMahon
What are the ways you know yourself to be alive, attuned, aligned with your body…your essence being nature? How do you give language to this sense of you? Have you even considered giving these ways of being a place in your everyday life?
Imagine for a moment, we are sitting in your favorite cafe, park, natural scenic location. I invite you into a conversation about how you know yourself to be alive, attuned, aligned with your body…your being. What might you say in response?
Many of us might respond by saying I am alive because my heart is beating, and I am breathing. I am attuned to the with the sounds around me and I am aligned in listening to you speaking. Which, for sure, is a great beginning!
And then, what is next? How might we expand upon this beginning. Becoming the observer into who and what we are begins with our usual sensing experience and it expands beyond. Being the Observer of life is recognizing that observing is Sourcing Creation.
“Observing is being fully present to what you are present to, opening up into what there is to open up into and having what is yours to have.” Tantra Maat
We have the capacity for sensation or feeling of information taken in through our senses. More than simply noticing, we bring the conscious willingness to engage with these sensory experiences. This conscious doing is ‘observing’! In becoming the observer, we open up into the field of Sentience…so what is it to be Sentient?
Living sentiently is the art and science of actively engaging with sentient processes, which develops awareness of access points to ‘the more of you’. This can also be described as ‘living beyond the circumstances of mind or the culture which you were born into’.
Moving beyond circumstance simply means, you make a place for the daily events of life and simultaneously engage with these events as a Sentient Being….in the fully embodied, fully present Presence of who and what you are.
We have a language or communication system through the body as the body sends language in chemical signals that we perceive in a sensory way. The body tells us when we are hot/cold, fearful/calm, settled/excitable…. etc. Butterflies in our stomach is a common way to describe when anxiety is upon us. This communication system is a beginning exploration into the Language of Sentience.
Sentience is defined as “sentient condition or character; capacity for sensation or feeling.” Dictionary.com expands upon sentience as being sentient as “having the power of perception by the senses; conscious.”
In our capacity for sensation, feeling and power of perception through the senses, we remember we are the power of consciousness itself. This capacity of sentience is innately present in each and every one of us as human beings.
Remember, from the definition of sentience, we have the capacity for sensation or feeling with information that arrives through our senses. And the art of being sentient is engaging with our sensory experience through the power of perception, which really means, being consciously conscious and in relationship with our senses. This is more than just noticing that we have sensory experience.
Engaging with your observings in a consciously conscious way, you experience how sensations, sensitivities, and imaginings thread together to deepen the felt experience and increase your capacity to track the full experience. Body sensation, emotions and thoughts support you in gaining access to how your system operates.
So, building sensory awareness develops your unique language of how you perceive sensation experienced in the body and how the emotion and thinking weave into the body sensation to build the whole network. The network that is Sentient Language.
Stop and listen within to experience the deepening right now.
In this now new moment, what are you observing? (a body sensation, a thought, an emotion, or something occurring in relationship to your being?)
In this observing, what is the next layer that you are becoming present to? And, in being present with this experience, what opens up for you?
Feel the next layer awakening…. notice whether you are experiencing mental thinking or beyond the thinking mind. (Sometimes this is experienced as “this is beyond what my thinking mind could come up with” or “wow, where did that thought come from” – I call it a download). Invite yourself to consider it as the cognitive perception of the more.
Again, check in and notice the thinking…. thought thinking (random thought or limiting thought such as judgment) or beyond thinking mind.
Simply continue observing what you are opening up into and observe again in this opening up into, what does this have you have?
Can you sense how you are with the moment just as it is, not dictating how or what arises (like watching a series of images or thoughts without creating a story or an ending)?
Take a breath….
The art of observing, over time, becomes the discovery into a way of living that engages your sentient awareness.
Breathe in fully….
So, did limiting thought emerge? Did you resist the thought, or could you see this as peeling another layer of the onion in a neutral way of simply observing the thought rising to the surface and making room for it?
As you deepen into your observing, limited thoughts are given a place. Remember everything is a part of everything else and everything has a place. This natural occurrence of limited thinking is simply another expression to show us in observation that we were born into a culture and system that disengaged us from the power and language of our Sentience. And as this is the truth of it, we are fully capable of restoring our connection!
Most of us have grown up and currently living in a culture (the world) that avoids, overlooks, and even disavows the value of Sentience. I am bound and determined to give Sentience a place. Will you join me…us?
Begin now! Engage with the practice of writing the Observing Templates in the final weeks of 2022 and join The Language of Consciousness Institute in January. Lori Candon and I will facilitate the two (2) session exploration: Moving Sentiently with The Observing and Observing Being Templates. Click here to register.
Moving Sentiently with the Observing & Observing Being Templates