This is a great body sensing exercise. You can do it for years. You can do it forever. If we’re going to start to study ourselves, we want to make it easier to develop the skills that would allow us to undertake such a study.

Set Up a Quiet Space

Get it as still, peaceful and quiet and free as distractions as you can. This will help with focus as we so easily pulled by externals.

Be Wakeful

Also, do it at a time where you are not likely to fall asleep doing it. If you are asleep, you won’t be doing the exercise and consequently you won’t be deriving any benefit from it. One of the positions is lying down and that’s the one where you are in a real danger of falling asleep. So you might not want to do it lying in your bed at the end of the day. You’ll discover the best times to do it, and don’t get down on yourself. Just discover times where you are alert enough to do it. Once you’ve developed that muscle, later on you’ll learn how to do it under more duress-ful conditions, or how to fight your sleepiness.

Stand, Sit or Lie Down

rotate through these positions

You can alternate the three positions, because you’ll learn different things about yourself. Sit comfortably, that’s one position. Lie flat on your back, relaxed. (It’s not a relaxation exercise, there’s no goal, other than to notice and then to remember.) Stand still in one position – not locked and you can shift your weight as needed, but it’s not about moving around. For people who can really find the time to do it you probably would want to do no more than one of each position a day. Otherwise just cycle through them, because it’s really different in each position. Standing up will tell you a lot.

Alternate Eyes Open and Eyes Closed

Alternate eyes open, eyes closed each time you do the exercise, so one time it’s eyes open and next time it’s eyes closed. The reason for doing this alternation is that, for most people, it is easier to get in touch with this stuff with eyes closed, but most of your waking life is with your eyes open. So you might as well start practicing now being able to not be so distracted by externals. The ultimate job is merging the nutrients of the external world with the seed of your essence, and getting the right measure of interaction of the outer world, and all the opportunities out there, with growing and birthing yourself and who you are.

Allow Five to Ten Minutes

not so long that you’re jumping out of your skin

How long? Ten minutes, five, whatever feels right. Whatever you can tolerate without feeling like you’re jumping out of your skin doing it. Probably ten minutes on the far end for people who really feel like they can pull it off, alternate them. (For some of those first few times, you might want to set a timer to set a maximum limit so your brain isn’t wondering if it’s seconds or minutes that have just gone by.) You can do this at any time during your day.

Be Excited!

bring your best energies to it and you’ll get more from it

Precisely what makes somebody really use an exercise, rather than have it be a mechanical thing you do, is you have got to be excited about it. Learn how to get yourself excited. That will pull the best of you into a situation – not nervous, but excited. Make sure that you don’t do it automatically, that you really use your best energies in doing it. And that will create energy mixes that are different in you, and slowly that starts to generate the kind of energies you’re going to need to have.

So the exercise will circuit you, but also if you do other things along with it, over time it will begin to generate slightly higher and greater amounts of energy. And if you learn how not to waste energies in various places, you’ll recognize you have a greater strength of mind or clarity. You’re going to see it in different places when it starts to work. The time frame is not predictable but if you do this stuff, as much of it as you can, day after day, then it’s going to grow on you, and you’ll grow into it. Do it slowly, without being frantic and in a rush, so that you’re really present with it and can assimilate it. You don’t want to overload your circuits.

Attempt to Notice Everything You Can

The first aspect of this exercise is registering every thought, feeling, sensation and impulse you can. So there you are. You’re lying/sitting/standing there. You’re making no attempt to suppress anything. It’s not a quieting your mind exercise. You’re not doing it right or wrong if nothing comes up or if everything and the kitchen sink comes up while you’re doing it. You are just observing and watching, learning to notice, and learning to self study. That’s all that you’re doing. Attempt to notice everything you can. Just notice.

Remember, Label and Write it Down

sensations, impulses, feelings, thoughts

Remembering is also part of this exercise. After you’re done, write down everything you can remember that you noticed and label it: sensation, impulse, feeling or thought. The effort to recall will also help develop powers of attention. Try not to worry about remembering while you’re observing the data.

Try to get a feel for what is originating from what aspect of your selfhood. Each one of those things comes from a different brain in ourselves. We’re real familiar with the intellectual brain. But there are visceral brains in us too, and if you really get into it in a sophisticated way, there are also nerve plexuses, hormonal depots – most of which are deactivated in most of us most of the time.

Basically, those are the major aspects of feedback from your body about the condition of your various brains and possible points of origination. And it’s really helpful to not be totally puzzled. For example, you can have a stomachache, but your stomachache can be owing to emotional causes, mental causes, physical causes, or some complex sequence or arrangement of those.

More about the Categories to Observe

When we look inside ourselves, there are three basic kinds of things happening in our psychic or somatic life, plus a fourth that is really a sub-class of the third. And interestingly enough, you can have them in any area of the body, or related to any area.

These things mix and blend, because one thing triggers another. A thought process will trigger something, or a bodily feeling might trigger something. Like you feel physically really good after a run, and then all the sudden you get emotionally high of that. You get an emotional high about it, or you feel very clear mentally, very good physically, and then you feel, feel a lot. You feel more, you feel more alive, but it’s a feeling. You get happy, you feel happy from it.

Sensations

The first thing you have is bodily sensations. Your arm feels cold, your hand feels numb, tingly… things like that. If it’s pain, is it a sharp pain or a dull kind of pain or another kind? It might be a sense of lightness. You want to notice the purity of physical sensations.

Impulses

This is a further class of sensations. Don’t act on an impulse while doing the exercise, but observe it. An impulse would be something like wanting to scratch in response to an itchy sensation. “I want to…” It’s a mix; it’s a reaction to a sensation. Something is provoking you. It has a movement, it wants to go somewhere, because it is an impulse. And it’s not coming from your mind, and that’s very important to start to get in touch with: not just what we think about who we are, but what comes from our own being, from our own body. Impulses can be an of indication of that.

Feelings

The third class is feelings. With any event that happens to us, feelings are either triggers of, or results of, events. Triggers or results of events. In the case of thoughts, they can obviously be both triggers and results. In the case of sensations, they don’t so much trigger themselves as they may trigger, something else.

Here’s a classic example: It’s the middle of the afternoon and suddenly you feel tired. Well, that might be a legitimate physical sensation. You’re going to then want to understand why are you physically tired, and maybe you are going to have to take a nap. But if you’re watching yourself closely, you may notice that you get tired, just after you started thinking about that term paper you have to write. In which case, it might be the wrong thing to be lying down right then.

Thoughts

Thoughts. We know a lot about those. What’s spinning in the brain? When you’re talking to somebody, what are you thinking about what they’re thinking about you while you’re saying whatever else you’re saying, instead of just saying it. We get self-conscious, worried about what people think, so we don’t always think or say what we could, because half of our energy is going into thinking about what they’re thinking about us, and then we wonder why we don’t communicate what we’re feeling very well. So we’ve got thoughts. Thoughts are very important, because a lot of things that happen to us result from thoughts interacting with our bodies. And we’re learning more and more about this. Psycho-somatic medicine has a lot to do with how thoughts affect other processes in our body, at other levels previously ignored or unknown.

Study and Learn From It

set aside a time for this

And then the other part of the exercise: put a separate time aside to understand what the meaning of it is. Because if you’re going to learn about yourself, you’re going to have to think about the puzzle of these things. It’s like a scientist observing data and then reaching hypotheses. And you may have to study the same thing again and again and again and again, and write it down in your log or your notebook, or your journal or whatever reference point you have. And then it’s like looking at pieces of puzzles, you’ll start to get hypotheses that you can test. For instance, you’ll notice that certain sequences happen in you, that certain kinds of feelings are always triggered by certain thoughts. Or that certain feelings trigger certain thoughts. Or certain feelings trigger certain sensations. That’s what you’re looking for here: what is the relationship between those things? Then you’re starting to also understand: what is the source of things?

If your body feels sluggish and that’s what you first feel, but then you get depressed, maybe you shouldn’t go off to see a head doctor for your depression. Maybe you should ask yourself, did you get down and then get sluggish, or did you feel sluggish and then get depressed? Maybe you should ask yourself, does it start with emotional stuff that you got into, or could it also be you are physically sluggish because of things you are doing wrong on a physical level, and maybe understand your biorhythms well enough to understand that because you eat so much heavy-duty sweets then three hours later you’re doomed to be sluggish and feel weakened. And then your automatic reaction to feeling weak is to hate yourself or be depressed about life or not feel like you want to live.

That’s an important thing to learn. It’s a big puzzle you’ve got to solve. If you want to solve a big puzzle take your time and study all the pieces. Take your time. Plus that study up front will help you figure it out and once you get rolling, you’ll really roll. We’re always, always, wanting to get it, get it, get it! To get it done with. And then we never do it in the kind of way where we’ll get any value out of it.

Relax and Be Patient with Yourself

this is unfamiliar and can take time

It’s going feel a little strange, a little unusual and you might look at yourself and say, “uh, it’s kooky lying here, and right now all I’m noticing is how miserable I am, and I’m not getting any benefit out of that.”

Because it’s just something new. It’s no different that a baby being awkward when a baby first starts to walk. Just put up with the process for a while and eventually the baby learns to walk. Unless Mom freaks out, or you freak out, that you’re a little clumsy and you’re not able to do the exercise. then you jam yourself.

This exercise gives you tools. If you start to practice, certain things will come easy. Other things you’ll feel like you’re miles away from getting to, but then it’s like solving a jigsaw puzzle. You finally see brown and brown and brown and you don’t know what it is, but you start to put the brown together and now it’s a tree, and now a lot of things make sense, the green makes sense, and so on. Suddenly you get a sense of what that puzzle might be. That’s the kind of patience you have to approach this with, as if it’s a thousand piece puzzle. Study all the pieces you can. When you make a connection put it together, but if it doesn’t quite fit you don’t give up. You don’t despair, you just take your time and wait for it to make sense. Be patient; that allows your best resources to be brought to the fore with this exercise.

The other nice thing about this exercise is learning to get to a state of just being outside and watching. If you’re going to enjoy your life, there’s the doer, and there’s the enjoyer. The degree to which you are joyous is the degree to which you are able not just to do things that are far out, but to be outside of them watching.

How many times do people do things and because there isn’t that observer they don’t take in what they’ve done? They build a beautiful table, and everybody else is, “wow, wow!!!” and then they feel, ”eh.” They can’t receive it because they were so involved in the doing, identified with the doing, without that separation, that transcendence, that outside-ness, that they couldn’t enjoy it.

So watching is also the beginning of point of leverage, of controlling and saying, “This is how I want to be! Now that I’ve observed what works and doesn’t, I’m making decisions.”

“Can you say more about the difference between sensation and impulse?”

A sensation and impulse are pretty close. An impulse would be something driving you to an action. You could feel that your legs feel cool (a sensation), but it wouldn’t drive you to an action. But if you feel an itch, you want to do something. So the impulse is more like, “what makes us do things?” With an impulse we’re getting in the realm of something that propels us to action, rather than just awareness of what’s going on. It is really helpful to recognize those things, because in terms of righting the whole show you’re going to have to understand the motivation of your impulses, and what to stop and what to go with.

The impulses are the ones that send the whole automatic machinery of the body into action; they’re dangerous. At work, say somebody gives you feedback and you get all stirred up inside, and you get reactive and weird and then you feel horrible about it afterwards. That’s an impulse to just get defensive and reactive and all that. And you might want to find some other way of dealing with that kind of impulse because the consequences of it are problematic for you. Impulses can also be really positive – really right and balanced.

Right at that threshold of an impulse moving into action, you have to be in command. You’re never going to become who you really are if you, succumb to the force and power of every impulse. And the impulses are going to happen! Say you want to improve your diet, get healthy or you want to exercise. There’s going to be an impulse, when it’s cold outside, not to run. Or at the bakery they lay out those breads in front of you. You’re just going in to buy your bread to eat with your meal, but they’ve got cookies out there or bread – SAMPLES! It smells really good and there’s going to be an instant when the smell hits your nose where you get so excited about the smell (your senses aren’t about the whole of you) that you’re ready to bite into it, even though you have a diet you’re trying to follow and this intention not to eat between meals.

So, the name of the game of getting things right is the ability to evaluate whether an impulse is an expression of something that’s positive, developmentally, in terms of your health or your goals, or negative that way.

No part of you thinks for the whole, and that’s the problem. There needs to be some part of us that evaluates everything that comes at us, and all the pulls and all the stimuli tended to. This is the role, potentially, of leading conscious lives. It gives you a chance of operating from a place of being conscious, not just sensitive.

You need a master with a carriage, horse, and driver. The wheels are taken care of, they’re in the right shape. The horses are groomed, they’re all that. The mind makes these decisions about what’s required here to be done: to get the horses in the right shape and the carriage in the right shape. And it needs to understand the master. That deep desire to get yourself right is the master. In a certain sense you could say the master has the power of that motive force of will, in a deeper sense, the will to be truly who you are, fully who you are, to get where you’re going. So the master is beyond the driver (the mind). The master has to be in a position of issuing commands and understanding what needs to be done. The driver has to understand, more technically how to get the job done. The master’s hands are not on the reins that connect the master to the horse, right? If you do it right, the master’s taking a ride. At the highest level of human development, you’re taking a ride and things are incredibly easy. But up until then, you’ve got to make sure everything is well attended to and everything is in the right place in relationship to everything else. And understand what’s amuck here? What’s wrong with the carriage and how does it need to be taken care of, fixed and repaired and put in the best possible shape, and what’s going to allow the wheels to move loosely rather than being stuck and rickety. What about the horse? Do you just let the horse eat whatever the horse wants to eat, and run whenever the horse wants to run, or lie around whenever the horse wants to lie around? If you do that, you’re not going to have a horse that’s going to serve you well.

It’s the responsibility, primarily of the driver, to understand what needs to be done, and of the master to understand why is it even being done? The master sets the larger, longer goals. The mind is the evaluator of what needs to be done and the planner of what needs to be done, what needs to happen. You want the power of the horse, but you want to nurture the horse in a way the horse becomes powerful. So you’ve got to feed the horse well. You’ve got to nourish the horse, but you’ve also got to exercise the horse and keep it strong. So it’s a little bit of nurture and tender loving care. And this is with every part of yourself – little bit of nurturance and a little bit of exercising, training and disciplining. And anyone that thinks that they can not do that, and still become everything they’re here to become, is completely crazy. There’s some kind of New Age mentality that, “everything will happen just right, all you have to do is just be open,” as if the cosmic, divine impulses will just come through you and your body will instantly obey and your emotional life will instantly obey and your mind will instantly do what it needs to do, or understand what needs to be done and even have a clear picture of it. We all should know ourselves well enough to know that that’s not the case.

Conclusion

This exercise is basically about you getting a sense of each part and aspect of yourself: the part which generates sensations, which is your body; the brain that generates your feeling impulses, which is your emotional ‘brain’; and your mind which generates your ideas.

We should know well enough that the mind is not an objective reader of reality. It should be, but it is not. There are a lot of things that we have ideas about, all the time. An idea that you can’t do this and you can’t do that. And you’ve got all the reasons and rationales, and it’s all clear in your brain, but then a situation forces or gives you an opportunity to discover something different about yourself other than your ideas. Then you discover that your mind was all wrong. It wasn’t reading out objective reality!

Part of the reason for these exercises is to get your mind in a place where it registers the reality, the facts, of your bodily state, of your emotional state, and even of the state of your mind.

So we’re talking about something beyond the mind here. We’re talking about something that can register your sensations, your impulses, your feelings, and your thoughts. We’re really talking about starting to see if you can find that part of you that’s outside your mind. It isn’t lost in the center of the mental activity. It isn’t lost in your emotional life. It’s the part of you that, when you’re doing something junky with somebody else, is outside that and recognizes it’s “off” in you. Maybe you can’t control it, maybe you can’t stop it, but you can recognize it.

That’s the beginning of the development of the master, and it needs to be cultivated. There needs to be time and space, and getting in the right position of leverage toward yourself. It’s like strengthening a muscle. All of this is strengthening and training muscles or circuits in yourself. How do you get to that place, where you train and strengthen the muscle that is the mind? Or you train and strengthen and nurture the part of you which is your feelings or your emotional life? Or train and strengthen and nurture the part of you which is your body?

So, this is a preliminary exercise to the first level Body Sensing. It’s basically Self Observation directed inward. You start to get separate. In some way you do have to get really separate, really objective, really separate. It’s not the ultimate way where you would gain control, but it’s the ultimate beginning point. You just watch, and all you want to do is register and remember and gather data.

From here you could begin to understand what needs to be done and what could happen. That’s first level body sensing. It’s being outside and just noting what comes up. You’re not engaged, you’re just watching and noticing what’s happening inside you.

In terms of making appropriate choices in your life, you would have to watch from that same place, and if you’re in your observer, you are going to have time before you just react to what comes at you!

Disambiguation: This exercise differs from the SIFT exercise offered by Daniel Siegel and Tina Payne Bryson in The Whole Brain Child, which is a wonderful book whether or not you are a parent. We arrived at the same acronym in 1996, but the letters stand for different things than what they arrived at later.