Over the years of my study of awareness, I have many times asked of myself to “go to my body,” and to “get out of my head.” I have understood that “getting out of my head” meant getting out of analyzing, thinking, explaining, to myself or others. Many times over I found myself valuing this shift of my attention to the landscape of my existence in that moment in time.
Only recently have I begun to feel an interest in the visceral landscape of “my head.” And so I asked an aware friend to tell me about these experiences. She said “No.” She said, “you need to take time and sit and wait to know your own experience.”
Though this made sense to me, I wanted to know acutely. I found a way around her advice. Reading at the beginning of the compilation of Charlotte Selver’s recorded classes, in Waking Up, I read about the experiences Charlotte’s students reported in the area of their heads in her session. When I read these reports, I realized I was,for some unknown reason, discounting what I did feel in that mysterious area. I named what sensation I felt there as “nothing.”
What follows are bits of Charlotte’s leading. After inviting her students to close their eyes, and to take time to come to rest in their eyes, and in their thoughts, Charlotte asked these rhetorical questions.
“ … it’s perfectly different from what you might ever have seen, so give up imagining it. Just feel if, when you give time and you don’t hurry yourself, what sensations, if any, come to you up in there, above your neck?… Don’t choose. No matter what it is, how little, how ridiculously little a sensation…no matter whether it feels good or not good … It doesn’t make any difference … What do you feel, if anything, in the area where you suppose your head is?… Is it possible not to “try to feel,” but to allow sensations to come?”
What was key for me was her surety that I among others could not imagine what sensations would come, and her making the “ask” smaller than the ask I would have for myself… “no matter how ridiculously little a sensation.”
I won’t tell you what experience I have of my head so far. What I will say is that waiting for the small sensations to arrive (infrequently and without fanfare, as they do) and tasting each one, I feel a satisfaction in my cells, a calm and quiet in my being, in being in my head.
– Frances Khanna, Ph.D., C.Psych.
Frances Khanna is the leader of the upcoming Sensory Awareness Training Workshop beginning Tuesday, May 24th in the evening at the Gestalt Institute of Toronto. Please call 416-481-1201 or write to franceskhanna@gmail.com with any questions about program content, or register here.