Start making sense
The journey of life is a veritable sensory tour, experienced and processed through combinations of sound, sight, touch, taste, and smell. Along the way we amass a collection of experiential souvenirs that arrange themselves according to likes and dislikes, ranging from neutral to craving or avoidance. Emotion and vivid memory are engines with powerful sensory ignitions – play me one bar of Madonna's "Get Into the Groove," and I'm instantly back in 1985, dancing in a dive bar in Syracuse with a lacy bow in my permed hair and a dozen black rubber bracelets climbing up my sleeve.
In yoga asana or meditation practice, we're encouraged to focus on what we sense in the moment, establishing steady signposts of presence. While meditating, presence creates the inner trail guide to avoid getting lost in the woods of anxiety, confused in the forest of distraction, or pushed off depression's cliff. On the yoga mat, presence keeps our joints and muscles injury-free, and our systemic bodies on track for the therapeutic reward of healing movement.
Those familiar with the fifth of yoga's eight-limbed path – pratyahara – which means "withdrawal of the senses,” may fear a contradiction. They may wonder if by noticing what they are sensing, they are getting it all wrong. Fear not, fellow travelers. You are indeed on the right path.
To withdraw the senses is to arrest the reactivity that assigns value or preference to these sensory inputs. It's the ability for a veteran with PTSD to hear a balloon pop and recognize they are safe at home rather than back in battle; it's the freedom to smell the waft of someone's cigarette and not drive, Zombie-like, to the nearest tobacco vendor and derail a decade of smoking abstinence; and it's the enjoyment of your favorite song without re-living the sorrow of the breakup it accompanied.
The Greek poet C.P. Cavafy expresses a beautiful sensory reconciliation in "Ithaka," where the mythical journey home makes room for "many a summer morning, where with what pleasure, what joy [we may] come into harbors seen for the first time [and] buy fine things ... as many sensual perfumes as you can." But when we finally arrive in our truest home – the one enshrined in silent presence – it has "nothing left to give you now ... wise as you will have become ... "
Here, in the Ithacas of our hearts, we are at once the sum of all we've enjoyed and endured, grounded in the depths of a clarified mind that glistens with a universal light, entirely senseless and completely alive.
~ Annie Moyer