Adventures into the senses
On a visit to my neighborhood public library, I came across Gretchen Rubin’s book Life in Five Senses: How Exploring the Senses Got Me Out of My Head and Into The World. The book’s position on the display shelf, its vibrant colors and that catchy title caught my eye.
This is a topic that interests me. As one who, like Rubin (and so many of us), tends to be in my head a lot, I’ve been coaching myself to spend more time in my senses. So I picked the book up and decided to check it out. Perfect light reading for spring.
Rubin is the author of several books, including The Happiness Project and Outer Order, Inner Calm. In Life in Five Senses, she writes about her adventures through her senses. It begins when she gets pink eye and goes to see an eye doctor, who treats her pink eye and then tells her she is at risk for a “detached retina”. She describes her alarm about what life would be like if she lost her eyesight. Walking back home from that eye exam, she starts to pay more attention to the world around her: the sights, sounds, smells and feel of New York City. She reflects how, as a writer with a busy life where she dwells mostly in the world of thoughts, words and ideas, she tends to take her senses for granted. She decides to devote time in her life to appreciate her senses more.
Sensory experiments
Rubin employs various interesting methods to explore her senses. Before she begins, she states that her foreground senses are sight and smell, while her background senses are touch, taste and hearing. But after her experiments she is surprised to notice how the senses she often dismisses are just as alive as the others, especially when she engages them mindfully, with appreciation and attention.
Here are some of Rubin’s sensory experiments: She visits the Metropolitan Museum of Art in Manhattan every day for a year, making a point to see different sections and taking notes on her experiences. She gazes at her husband’s orchid and is amazed at the color variations in its petals and leaves. She ventures out of her comfort zone to attend a live music concert and a sound bath. She goes to “Dinner in the Dark”, a dining experience at a restaurant where guests dine blindfolded. She buys a perfume that reminds her of her college days. She visits a sensory deprivation chamber. And – I love this – she sends her family off to her in-laws for the weekend and enjoys a silent retreat at home.
There’s more: Rubin visits the Immersive Van Gogh exhibit where huge animated Van Gogh paintings, accompanied by background music, are projected onto the walls and floors of enormous rooms. She tries out the 5-4-3-2-1 technique of getting in touch with the senses, (one of my favorites, mentioned in a previous article). She joins a taste class to expose her tongue and palate to various flavors, and also discovers a new appreciation for common flavors like ketchup and vanilla. She develops a Manifesto for Listening, where she begins to listen deeply to others, paying attention to both what they say and what they don’t say. I especially love this tip from her listening manifesto which I plan to put into immediate practice: “When in doubt, stop talking.”
Expanding the range
Rubin develops creative names for her endeavors, including My Color Pilgrimage, Tastes Timelines, Five Senses Journal, Book of Aphorisms, Muse Machine, and Audio Apothecary (where she creates a playlist of songs she loves). She describes her pursuit of the senses “from the ordinary to the sublime” as expanding her range of sensory experiences, becoming conscious of her senses in both stimulating and less interesting environments. This included training herself to see familiar, repetitive and predictable things in novel and exciting ways, acquainting herself with the experience of boredom, exploring the mundane just as eagerly as she would the spectacular and breathtaking. She concludes that we have the capacity to experience awe and joy in so many different places and situations if we just tried.
Rubin’s journey through her senses increased her ability to enjoy her own company while also giving her greater satisfaction being with others. She became more aware of her inner sensations (interoception) like hunger and heart beat, and developed her body’s ability to sense the movement and position of various parts of her body (proprioception), e.g. climbing stairs without looking. She noticed that the sensory activities that were structured and disciplined were just as fun and instructive as those that were unstructured and flexible.
Awakening our senses
At the end of Rubin’s book is a 10-page list with tips on ways we can engage more deliberately with our senses, such as placing a vase of flowers in your home or office, or wearing a bright scarf or accessory. She also suggests some fun online resources for our senses, like The Monkey Business Illusion and “Laurel” or “Yanny” (It’s most definitely Laurel).
I tried out some of her tips: I wore a hot pink sweater to work that I’d abandoned several years ago, and felt fabulous. And instead of passing the mulberry tree at my office parking lot after work, I have been reaching up and eating some of its ripe berries (yum).
Here’s how Rubin summarizes her experiences:
My senses were precious because of the sheer pleasure they gave me, but even more precious was their power to tie me to the people, places, and ordinary moments that I wanted to experience and remember from the drifting, ephemeral material of life.
Photo by Nicholas Ng on Unsplash