Sentient Body
"Our deepest sense of life is a movement tendency..."
“Our sense of well being depends on unfolding subtle
body sensations that reflect the underlying dreaming or essence level of
reality... I have found that all body movements and symptoms can be traced
back to these tiniest, most subtle, 'imaginary' experiences that precede
their 'real' everyday appearances."
Arnold Mindell~Quantum Mind and Healing
What is the “Sentient Body”? The Sentient Body is our deep physical
experience of our animal body; the animal body connected with the
environment through sensory perception. Without “conscious” thought or
emotion, animals have an uncanny ability to flow, their instincts allow them
to understand, process, and integrate into their surroundings. The animal
appears to feel a sense of connectedness and is not conscious of “other”
when in relationship with the landscapes they inhabit.
Sentient is defined as “endowed with feeling and unstructured
consciousness”, “responsive to sense impressions, aware, or finely sensitive
in perception or feeling”. Arny Mindell in Dreaming while Awake
says “Sentient… refers to the continuous and automatic awareness of subtle,
normally marginalized experiences and sensations.”
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The Sentient Body has a continuous awareness of subtle sensations and experiences; it is our deep physical experience. Sentience is the body’s language, its communication with the conscious mind’s awareness. Connecting with the Sentient Body means inviting in subtle feelings and sensations and focusing on their presence, we develop a familiarity and language of relationship with the body’s experience. By focusing on these subtle levels we access an altered state of consciousness that is sentient awareness. |
As we make a practice of recognizing these underlying tendencies, they
become more prevalent and responsive to our awareness, engaging with us.
They no longer need to be strong to catch our attention; we become attuned
to the more subtle, vague sensations, and catch them at early, emerging
levels. We can respond with awareness, reinforcing and directing this
essence level reality. In this we become co-creators with the underlying
matrix of wholeness, or Dreaming.
We can interact with, affirm and support essence level experiences, the
world of undifferentiated awareness and the unconscious, so they do not need to
amplify and emerge into the human world of parts and polarities to engage
our attention and interaction.
“Nonlocal sentient awareness precedes all creation and
manifestation and is a core principle of shamanism, psychology, and other
sciences. … For what I call sentient awareness, Jung would have called the
unconscious - that characteristic creative ingredient of everything that
happens.”
Arnold Mindell~Earth Based Psychology
Animal Body
the animal body,
bored with this world.
Wanting the mind to sink deeply,
into flesh and tendon, blood and gristle,
and from there view what holds us.
Heat burns away
mind’s connection to details and control.
Seeing rises from belly and heart,
no longer actor and acted.
Body sees wholeness,
moving through space,
connected intimately
with landscape and animal.
Without eyes, it knows,
there is no other.
No you nor me, or us and them.
There is just this.
Intimate, fragile, tender,
the connection of spirit and flesh
flowing between all things.
This body an invitation,
awaiting my commitment
to this animal body seeing,
to this animal body loving.
Copyright 2002-Lisa Marks
Sentient
Body
© 2009
