If you have ventured into yoga or martial arts, you know how essential developing your awareness is for the practice. Heightened awareness, sometimes translated as mindfulness, is the primary goal and achievement of the exercises, and as I have discovered recently, all those advices to “go within” and “observe the sensations” have their sound physiological bearing.
While we are generally taught, that we can count on our five senses, neuroscientists dive into much more complicated taxonomy of sensors, classifying them according to a number of factors. For example, based on the source of the perceived stimulus, sensory receptors may be exteroceptors, interoceptors and proprioceptors. Turns out vision, hearing, taste, smell and touch all fall into the first group, because they are activated by stimuli outside of the body and provide information about the external environment. Additionally we have exteroceptors for temperature, pressure, vibration, infrared light and arguably even magnetic fields…
Interoceptors monitor internal dynamics – like blood pressure, glucose concentration or degree of stretch in tissues – they inform those multiple subtle and necessary adjustments our body performs automatically to maintain healthy equilibrium; or in other words – keep us alive.
Proprioceptors send information for the position and posture of our body in space, registering stimuli from the muscles, tendons, joints and the vestibular apparatus. If it wasn’t for them we wouldn’t be able to negotiate gravity or accomplish such smooth sensory-motor choreographies like yoga and dance.
How come we hardly notice these other two groups? As the old saying goes – no news is good news – our brains are tuned to report only large deviations from the norm to the conscious mind and this autonomy of function provides us with the blissful ability to remain deep in thought while moving through familiar environment. Focused on minimising energy loss, our body is a master of macro deployment – all repetitive actions quickly get cyclic status and trigger by default, without much ado. Such program loops, cognitive scientists call schemas, we tend to utilise tons of them daily, and for most of the time – subconsciously.
And here comes the validity of the waking call – to bring awareness to our breathing, to pay attention to our surroundings, to use a different route every now and then, to remember to be curious and switched on, present “in the now”, because otherwise it is too easy to fall into the soft comfort zone of the routine and spend a few years not actually noticing the world around; or inhabiting a movie of our own making.
Like every mechanism not exercised sufficiently, if we choose to subdue our sensitivity it will diminish and vice versa. Practising music will train the ear, practising sports will train the heart, and practising awareness will train the mind. True – paying too much attention to subtle hints, borders on paranoia and observing every passing mood could easily overload our reason – therefore the sister concept of awareness in mindful practices is detachment: observe but don’t get entangled.
For the quest to control everything on purely intellectual level is inherently distorted. Once we realise to what immense extent our bodies, sensors; senses and feelings command our reflexes, daily life and world views, chances are we start trusting more our visceral wisdom, which is not necessarily located only in the gut…