Coming Back to Our Senses

I hear it in the first few sessions with nearly every new client: “I want to be more present.” The need is real. And it’s natural.

“Presence” begins in sensation. When we attend to what we see, hear, taste, touch, and smell, we are present.

There are other ways we can be present, including how we relate to our emotions. We’ll come to those. For now, it helps to start where presence usually begins: with the senses.

There are often good reasons we disconnect from our senses. Staying fully aware of what we’re sensing isn’t always safe or useful.

We disconnect from our wakeful connection to our senses because the world is always moving, and we need to stay ahead of it.

This is how our ancestors survived, and it’s how the mind evolved to help us survive. Not being dinner mattered just as much as finding dinner in the first place.

The problem arises when this disconnection from our senses stops being situational and becomes habitual. When we habitually disconnect from our senses, we lose something essential. Our thinking grows louder, while our connection to the present moment becomes harder to feel and trust. In time, anxiety quickens, energy drains, and depression can take hold.

The way I see it, many of my clients don’t come to therapy because anything is wrong with them. They come because this very basic connection with themselves has gone offline.

So let’s take a moment to explore the importance of being present with our senses before we venture into the “what” and “why” of it all.

Sitting at the Edge of Our Experience

I’d like to invite you now, for the length of a few breaths, to tune into a few of your senses.

Let’s start with vision. Look around. What do you see? Notice how details emerge.

Take a breath and notice how the light falls on what you’re seeing. If you were a painter or photographer, where would your attention naturally settle? What would invite your focus?

Now let’s attend to sound. Pause for a moment and listen to the world around you. Allow yourself to inventory movement through sound. How many distinct sounds can you identify?

As I write this, I can hear my dog’s nails clicking on the tile in the room next to me. A fan humming. A car driving away somewhere in the distance.

Now breathe. Feel the body welcome the air. The chest rises, then falls.

Do you notice a slight quieting? A sense of being more awake? It’s because your attention has returned to your senses.

When Stress Grows Louder

When stress carries forward from day to day, the mind gradually loses its mooring in the senses. We find ourselves using more and more mental energy with very little movement forward.

The mind stays busy, but it’s not as effective. Thought multiplies, effort increases, and yet nothing really resolves. We’re working harder mentally without actually going anywhere physically.

It can help to think of this like carrying a growing balance on a credit card. Each unresolved stress adds a little weight. Over time, our mental energy goes toward paying interest on what’s accumulated, while the original balance rarely gets paid down.

When that balance finally gets paid, the system settles. Energy quiets. Attention naturally returns to the present moment.

The mind’s purpose is to keep us moving, sometimes fearfully and sometimes peacefully. It moves us toward our needs and away from threats to those needs. When this happens, the account gets settled.

When needs are frustrated or threatened, energy increases. When needs are met, the mind quiets and attention returns to the present.

When needs don’t get met, or when there’s conflict between different needs, the energy grows turbulent. A little turbulence is natural. It’s a signal that something in you needs attention.

Prolonged turbulence, even a small amount, devolves into something else. Something painful.

We call this rumination. We can feel like we are literally “losing our mind.”

For some of us, rumination isn’t dramatic. It’s heavy. A weight we might ignore, if the quiet of night didn’t bring it forward again. For others, it’s much more dramatic. Either way, we suffer needlessly.

What’s Going On Under the Hood?

If you’re interested in why this happens, here’s a simplified explanation. Feel free to skip this section if you’d like.

It comes down to this: flow is natural. We evolved for it, and it generally works like this.

We sense the world, and our sensory networks send information downstream to our meaning-making systems.

These systems paint experience with meaning and assign emotional energy.

That energy is organized through our collected stories about the world and ourselves. These are our beliefs. Our beliefs about the world, about ourselves, and about how we should navigate life.

Those newly formed belief-stories then flow onward through the meaning-making systems and toward the motor networks for enaction.

Problems arise when we get stuck in an evaluation-and-decision feedback loop. Excessive stress makes decision-making noisy and confused. The flow toward action gets interrupted because the system struggles to settle on what to do next. The noise drowns out the melody of intention.

Energy begins to swirl instead of moving forward. It doesn’t complete the circuit back to action. As a result, feelings become turbulent, thoughts accelerate, and rumination emerges.

Reconnecting with the Senses

The mind exists to navigate the world. To do that well, it requires a strong connection with the senses. When the connection is strong, stress quiets. When the connection is weak, stress grows louder.

Although the process begins with the senses, the problem usually isn’t there. Trouble arises downstream, when no helpful beliefs emerge to guide action, or when multiple beliefs compete and pull in different directions.

Restoring the flow from belief to enaction is one way to invite smoother movement of mental energy. The reason is simple. The brain is not a system of individual parts operating in isolation. It is a connected system.

The sensory systems that form the foundation of our experience share resources with the motor networks that drive our behavior. We call this coupling the sensory-motor network. When sensation is muted or bypassed, action loses confidence. We lose confidence.

Many of us were taught, often unthinkingly, to skip our senses and move straight to behaving “the right way.” Over time, this trains us to bypass or ignore our felt sense of meaning and rely on shoulds, should-nots, and “because that’s how we’ve always done it.”

Reconnecting with our senses brings us back to the ground of the mind. Not as an idea, but as a direct experience. It gives the conceptual mind, the part tasked with deciding and evaluating, a much-needed rest.

Small Shifts Create Large Change

We don’t need silent retreats or long meditation sessions to be present. What’s required is simpler, and sometimes much harder: learning to return our attention to what is already there. Our sensory experience.

In the next post, I’ll offer two ways of doing this. Both have emerged from the helping community over the years and have been found helpful by many. These two practices are Sense Grounding and Sense Foraging.

If you, or someone you care about in the Houston area, is struggling with the weight of their inner life, or noticing problem patterns that need to be changed, I invite you to reach out. I may be able to help.