Jenna Caplette migrated from California to Montana in the early 1970s, first living on the Crow Indian reservation. A Healing Arts Practitioner, she owns Bozeman BodyTalk & Integrative Healthcare. She says, " Health is resiliency, a zest for the journey. It’s about coming awake to the joy of being alive. As a practitioner, its a privilege to facilitate that healing process, to help weave new patterns of health & well-being.
As spring arrives, the earth warms, and our Montana outdoors fills with luxurious sensory details of color, sound, texture and smell. Be sure to make time to notice, to immerse yourself in that luxury. It’s actually important for your physical, your emotional and mental health.
Each of us begins our experience of life through our senses: the feel and smell of mother, the taste of food, or the sounds of family and home. It is through our senses that we begin to identify the boundaries of our physical selves. Our sensory and emotional experiences become windows to how we view the world, how we experience what is happening around us.
Imagine that as babies we're clear as a light bulb, glowing from inside, bright and inquisitive, abundantly curious. Then our experiences begin to cover and dim that bulb. Sounds we don't like, perhaps repeated experiences of someone yelling at us and the feel of that anger, can limit how and what we hear. We attach beliefs to various senses – yelling is bad and scary and we don't want to be yelled at. If our response is to withdraw, then over time that response becomes automatic and unconsidered when someone yells at us. We narrow and limit our capacity to hear, to interpret and experience sound.
Our sensory and emotional experiences as children become the basis for our personal beliefs. Our brains interpret and filter all the information that arrives through our senses, making decisions on how to categorize and file that information. Our belief systems become part of the organization of that filing system, become another set of filters. Our experience becomes distorted.
Sure other things influence that process, things like genetic inheritance, family and cultural attitudes and beliefs – our brains give us extraordinary capacity to complicate everything. They also give us an extraordinary capacity to heal, to restore much of our access to our senses, to remember how to glow. Effective healing modalities – I work as a BodyTalk practitioner – can help you identify filters and facilitate a clearing process. That clearing can improve your health.
Season changes can act as an invitation to come back to your senses, to dial in your awareness of your environment.
Why does it matter? It feels great to come awake to the world, especially in the spring, when everything is greening up, coming alive. And, compromised as they may be, your senses offer you a doorway back to yourself, right now. Today. When you put your attention on sensory input, say the sound of robins in your backyard, you slow the business of your mind as it filters data and gives you input about everything. You know the chatter. It can be incessant and exhausting.
Focus on sound, on color and light, on the feel of the greening grass under your bare feet. Don't try to focus on all your senses at once. Choose one and truly focus on what input is available to it in the moment. For however long you can maintain your focus, your thoughts will take a back seat and your body will relax. Come back to your senses as often as you can each day, and at night if mental chatter keeps you awake.
Immerse yourself in the gifts of the season. In any moment when you can be fully present to your senses, your inner light will glow.