Return to Your Senses

Nothing would be the same after that day…nor could I understand all the ways that was true.

I was in a deep sleep when the phone trilled. Certain I had once again overslept; my nervous system launched its menagerie of physical sensations that expressed its state of panic as my mind quickly composed another version of sincere apology for the poor coworker I assumed was forced to make this ill-timed call. Operating at an entirely opposing speed, my arm clumsily reached for the offending phone as a froggy voice attempted to deliver sound.

For a split second, I registered there was something about the light outside my window that did not align with the way my mind was interpreting this unwelcome awakening. As if responding to my dissonance, or adding to it, the sound of her horror flooded the space between my yet to be spoken greeting and slumber addled mind. To this day, I have no idea what words she wailed across those braided copper wires, but my cells will never forget their shrill tone of terror.

After exchanging sounds intended to convey a horrific meaning my mind refused to hold on to, I set the phone back into its cradle. My body moved through a series of behaviors while my mind repeated some ill begotten mantra of denial. It played its soundtrack of delusion all the way to the emergency room. It didn’t stop until a familiar face, found in the waiting room, met my eyes with a sickening look of pity. His words, “I’m sorry, he didn’t make it…” tore a hole in my psyche.

Silence filled the rended space. It had to have been a psychologically induced hush, nature’s way of softening the harshness of the moment, because it could not have been produced by the chaos of this urban-based emergency room. As if moving on a conveyor belt, I remember passing through curtained corridors and having no sense of self ambulation.

With the flourish of a magician, someone dramatically pulled a drape, and there before me lay an ashen illusion of my father. In some instinctual attempt to feel the warmth of his embrace, I fell onto his chest. It was his body temperature, or rather the absence of it, that brought me back into my own body. Somehow, the impossibility that my 49-year-old father was no longer inhabiting this world with me became true. My feet seemed to sprout roots and ground me in that place while everything else around me slipped off a precipice.

In a deeply altered state of consciousness, I heard words gently volleyed across the room between family members and medical personnel. Sitting in a bubble where time had no conceptual value, I stayed fixed and transfixed until someone gently nudged my shoulder and indicated it was time to exit the veiled space that held our devastating reality. Reentering the sensory world was jarring and disorienting because somehow a portion of me had been erased and my boundaries were so porous everything felt louder, brighter, more articulated and singular.

I remember walking down a corridor towards a window that framed an outdoor scene that seemed to have undergone some technicolor editing. Everything was crisper, brighter, and richer in color. I did not know why, but it was clear my sense perception had “leveled up.” And I am not going to lie, it was spectacular! As grief stricken and numb as I was, it felt surreal that my senses were delivering a version of the world that I had never experienced before…and one I genuinely liked!

As I wound my way through a maze of hallways, I remember being followed by the most peculiar sound. It was a rhythmic clicking that felt so loud and proximal, I was sure it had to have originated from something on my person. As I slowed my pace to survey my own body and belongings, a nurse continued past me and I noticed the clicking matched her pace, not my own. In a perceptual awareness that lay well outside of the rules of time, I felt an environmental attunement that reminded me of scenes from the Bionic Woman. Although missing the signature foreshadowing “shuh nuh, nuh, nuh, nuh” sound in the show, my senses were no less superhuman in their effect. With a focus beyond explanation, I noticed the sound emanated each time the plastic cover at the end of her shoelace struck the top of her shoe. I knew it made no sense that it was so pronounced but it seemed to fall in line with how my eyes had exaggerated perception earlier.

As I approached the automated doors leading to the parking ramp, I walked through what felt like a wall of aroma. Co-mingled and yet well-articulated, I smelled an acrid presence of burnt coffee, while a sweet dance of yeast and nuttiness found their way to the back of my throat, initiating a cascade of saliva. Although my brain identified it as “smells of breakfast,” the mix was so potent, it felt noxious.

Somehow finding my way back and now safely enclosed in my car, I remember starting it and nothing more about that day…and several more that followed it. That day delivered some of life’s most painful moments as well as a myriad of new awarenesses that continue to define my behavior to this day, but the one I am attempting to share with you took a little over a decade to land. In fact, it did not really find traction until it emerged as a pattern and less as an inexplicable rarified experience.

I will never forget how my senses amplified on the day my father died. But it happened again… the day my sister died.

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The morning was like any other and I was mindlessly going through my morning routine. I was making a smoothie at the time. The set of movements was so habituated they required little focus, until something not at all ordinary caught hold of my attention. I used powdered peanut butter in our smoothies, and that particular brand came in a pouch that had a vinyl Velcro system to re-seal the bag. When I opened the pouch, it was as if I heard every single hook and loop separate right inside my ear. I remember saying, “What on earth?!”  As quickly as the phenomenon arrived, it retreated into “senses as usual.” 

We spent the day engaged in typical activities, working, going out to dinner and returning home. But later that evening, I received a call from my devastated mother sharing that my sister had been found dead. Family members suspected she had passed sometime between the hours of 5 and 7:30 am. I remember thinking, “It was 7:09 am” because that was the time on the clock when the Velcro flooded my senses.

As a culture, we place an inordinate emphasis on our minds’ intellectual capacities, so much so that we have lost touch with our body connection. And I am the first to admit, I love my time lost in thought, daydreams, and creative inspiration. But I have moved my body around this planet for 54 years now and much of that time was spent in a fairly dissociated state. It took me starting a meditation practice, going through a health issue that demanded comprehensive chiropractic care and throwing myself out of a plane just to feel in my body again and I have come to a conclusion that cannot be understated.

It is our bodies that hold our capacity to recognize, feel, and know a connection. It is our bodies that hold the intersection between self, other and something beyond. It is our bodies where true living is experienced. And our attunement with it delivers the heightened experience of present moment connection.

I know these stories sound like fiction, like some idealized version of self-possessed superpowers. But it is with great humility that I assert we ALL have access to this because we all have brilliant, finely calibrated systems for connection: The human body.

When my mind went offline, refusing to accept the fact that my father died at the age of forty-nine, my body had the ability to deliver unclouded sensory experience. And when I was in that state, I had the profound experience of realizing how much our five senses can deliver and how rich our encounters with life can be. We also have a series of complicated chemical interactions that generate emotional responses to our experiences. These too are felt as bodily sensations. But when we stay identified with the activity of our mind, or resistant to uncomfortable sensory experience, we blunt our bodies messages and reduce our capacity to feel connection.

Our bodies are also indisputably impermanent. When they stop functioning, our ability to have this kind of lived experience will also end. Shouldn’t this fact enliven and motivate us to appreciate and reconnect with our bodies? And yet, somehow the opposite appears truer. We abuse our bodies, push them, at times overindulge them, judge them, fight their discomforts, and make enemies of them. But what might happen if we came home to our bodies and started to truly pay attention to their remarkable sensitivity and their mysterious ways of communicating?

I cannot say I always like how my body feels, but I have come to trust the way it communicates across, through and beyond itself. And I know this for certain; my most memorable experiences have always been associated with body rich connection.

What is your relationship with your body? Please share an experience when your body felt tuned into something beyond the ordinary.