You Must Be Present to Win – Sensual Living
May Swenson said, “Not to be fully aroused to the potentialities of one’s senses means to walk the flat ground of appearances.” What this means is You Must Be Present to Win. Stay with us today for some thoughts on using your senses to bring the richness out of your story. The best and most interesting stories are full of rich detail. Not only is this an important technique in writing in order to take your reader where you want them to go and to help them recreate the scene in their own minds, it becomes an important part of living your own story – being fully present and aware within your own life, being in the present is required to take home the prize.
Stories are our lives in language. Welcome to the Love Your Story podcast. I’m Lori Lee, and I’m excited for our future together of telling stories, evaluating our own stories, and lifting ourselves and others to greater places because of our control over our stories. This podcast is about empowerment and giving you, the listener, ideas to work with in making your stories work for you. Story power serves you best when you know how to use it.
There is always the fine print on the bottom of the ticket that tells you that if you wander off before the drawing for the K2 skies, the facial, or the trip to Costa Rica, the loot will not fall into your hot little hands.
Years ago I had a large wooden sign – I mean big – it was six-feet long, and it read “You Must Be Present To Win.” I hung it proudly on my dining room wall. There were a variety of interpretations, but my reason for having it there was to remind me that every moment that my mind was not fully attentive to the present experience – the smell of my son as he sat on my lap so I could read him a book, the tightness of my arms paddling across Tony Grove lake in my canoe, the feel of the breeze across my skin as I speed down a mountain path on my bike, the brilliant intricacy of a flower when I look at it in detail – every time I let those details go unnoticed I lose. I lose the opportunity to take with me what that experience offers. I lose the opportunity to be most fully alive. I skim the waters of living instead of getting deep and real.
Our senses – sight, smell, touch, taste, hearing and I add intuition – these are the filters through which we get to interpret the world. Our senses help us connect with what surrounds us. There is a great deal of brain that is dedicated to our senses. This relationship between our senses and our brains is subjective – for example, it’s been proven that to some people cilantro tastes like a delicious herb, and to others it has a soapy flavor. The receptors in our taste buds work differently for different people, and though it’s only been in the last 30 years that scientists have figured out how smell works, it is scientifically proven that everyone smells things differently. Sight takes up a large portion of the brain, but what we see and how we see it is often influenced by our fears, our stories, our perspectives. Our senses are our link with the world around us. But when we go on auto-pilot, there is an awful lot that goes on that we miss because we aren’t paying attention. This is where the richness is found or lost. This is where you win or lose the prize.
A few months ago I was in a group coaching meeting where a woman confessed that her life was good, she wasn’t having any problems, except that because things were running smoothly she was bored and felt life didn’t hold very much for her at the moment. Dulled and complacent she was numb. There is definitely a space in life where we are so used to stimulation, that without chaos or something extraordinary to get our chemicals flowing life feels dull, uncolorful, muted. This is not the only time we have proof of not using our senses. It also happens when we are moving so fast that we can’t take time to notice what’s going on...
