It’s January, it’s cold, and Van and I are watching a lot of Sesame Street. We’re watching more than our fair share of all of the ‘Preschool on TV’ shows. They all take a theme and come at it in as many different directions as they can. Today’s Sesame Street was about the 5 senses. The characters go through various exercises in deciding how best to experience their outer world. Oscar the Grouch has a sardine sundae. Taste! Radar the Teddy Bear. Touch tells us he’s soft. Etc.
Unless you’ve recently been around a little one, you forget that you, too, had to learn to articulate to yourself that it was your sense of smell that told you it was time for a shower or your sense of hearing that told you that Car Talk is on. We also have combinations of senses: touch-see (crucial for that satisfactory shopping experience for me), smell-taste (often absent in cold season). Just try ‘tasting’ banana Laffy Taffy without seeing that fantastic yellow color. The multi-layered sensory experience gives the world depth and texture and often more information that would otherwise be obvious to us. It’s seamless now, but there was a time that we could do all this stuff without being able to tell ourselves or share with others what we were doing.
It’s so important to teach the little ones how to use their senses and describe how they got their experiences. We teach them which questions to ask and how to go about asking those questions with their senses. As grown-ups, we often think that we’re done with all that or get frustrated when what we want to get to just won’t come. We have the sentient capacity to know our hearts, but we often haven’t reviewed how to go about doing just that.
Through the process of yoga, in one form or another, we learn how to turn these sensitivities inward. We have techniques for tasting our inner experience as much as our outer one. We feel, hear, smell (this one’s harder, but try for memory here, especially place memory), and see parts of ourselves that are sometimes hard to reach. And, just as Van is consciously making smell memories of NYC and letting the visual and physical layout of our home deeply imprint on his brain, I’m doing the same thing in practice and meditation. Simultaneously making sensory connections and memories, so that in a moment that I seem far from my soul I can know how to get there again.
Van watches Elmo see and hear and feel, while I do Harshada’s Seven Chakra meditation on Yogaglo. It strikes me that we’re doing the same thing. I’m learning how to use my different energy centers to feel around my subtle body. (Harshada was talking about ‘centers’ and I mis-heard ‘senders’. Which is cool, too.) Van is learning that it’s his skin that tells him about the state of his outer body. The questions seem so simplistic to me, and I almost want to answer them out loud for him. But then I think that I’m something like a toddler (well, maybe an adolescent) in this spiritual education. I have a lot of stuff memorized, but I’m still working on what facts and techniques to apply in which case. I’m still getting my wits about me.
