I've got a feeling

I was on a hike with a friend of mine when we both stopped in a sudden, unplanned and synchronistic realization that the wind was blowing warmly and with a sense of spring neither of us had felt in a while. It was one of the first times this year that I had felt the sun on my shoulders; though they were just as dimpled by the shadows of the trees as they were warmed by the cloudless sky. It was worth stopping for a moment to feel it.

The moments that followed involved the full and uninterrupted occupation of my body, noticing the warmth of the air as it slid by my shoulders and moved around me. Suddenly it all felt stronger than it had before. The weather was more enjoyable, though it had hardly changed from the moments that led up to this.

When we talk about presence, we often talk about the senses. When we orient our attention to the body and its way of experiencing, we are fully engaged with our senses. Sometimes, this can be overwhelming, but it can also be a nice way of attending the moment we’re in. So, in this essay, I want to talk about touch.

I spent more than half of my life getting as far from my body as I could. I sought every opportunity to be deeply in my head, removed from any possible sensation that could arise and remind me of where I am, and the corporeality I occupied.

Now that I'm older, I assume this was a response to any number of things, each which had developed a distaste for any relationship between my consciousness and this physical manifestation of it (which are one in the same, of course). It was trauma, insecurity, dissatisfaction in my circumstances, shame, you name it. All of which I negotiated with, as we do with all things, and in the end, we agreed on distance. I put my mind in one box and my body in another. 

When I began to recognize that I had built this distance, it already felt like it was too late. I was envious of the people who didn’t fall for this type of trap and didn’t become mind-oriented when the world pushed them to. I was jealous of those who sat in their bodies, who didn’t feel their body drag on the weight of their spirit. 

Before my brothers or I were born, my mother was in a car accident that left her clinically dead and forced to relearn all of the ways her body moved. To walk, talk, eat. She had little memory and her world essentially started over. Sometimes I try to imagine what that was like for her, to learn her body again. If she were still alive today, I would ask her. But instead, I imagine.

Combined with the perspective of ‘first timeism’, where I pretend things are being experienced for the first time despite not actually being that, and my mother's experiences, I try to imagine what it is like to learn it all over again. How do I call on the body to remember?

Touch is one of my favourite ways, which is why I’m finally bringing us back to that. 

When I sat in the wind with my friend and we were both infinitely listening and experiencing, I was reminded why I began to learn what this was like again. Despite being afraid of what I’d find, which was this trauma, insecurity, dissatisfaction with my circumstances and shame, I challenged myself to explore this sense like a child. I have spent the last five years since my mother passed in active service of tending to my body in this way, allowing myself to feel what it’s like to be here; to connect with the body as a tool for remembering where we are.

It is easier for me to push this sense aside, to use my brain and its mechanisms to enter autopilot even for touch and forget the tactile senses of pressure, temperature, pain and texture. It was safer to retreat than to feel all of it, good or bad. 

So when I decided to take the time to appreciate touch more deeply, it started with texture and doing my best to feel the difference between the things I came into contact with. I wanted to explore the sensations as if they were new to me, like I had never felt cotton, or velvet, or thorns. I didn’t want to allow the process of ‘remembering’ touch to involve the process of memory. I wasn’t ready for that anyway.

Instead of using touch and presence to activate my awareness through what I had come to know, I decided to start fresh. I felt towels for the first time, I still do; like I have never felt one before. It became useful for me to reconnect with my body when I stripped it of this sort of memory-based state and instead focused on learning the sensations as they are, or as they presented themselves. It’s a wonderful thing to feel the wind for the first time over and over again. In this way, I redirected the sensation of wind from reminding me of the last time I felt the wind, to learning the wind this new time, as it arrives and interacts with me. It is this intimacy with the right now, with the sensations of touch here, that I’m talking about, because you’ve never been here before. 

This isn’t to say that memory is not useful in our attempts to reconcile our histories with our presence. It is also fair to say that our bodies are evidence of the fact that we’ve lived through at least as long as we’ve been alive. So memory can hold this sort of contextual benefit for why our bodies may feel the way they do. We may be reminded, through touch, of what we want to or would prefer not to remember. This is the risk, right? Of feeling pretty much anything at all? That this might go sideways? We might feel hurt or afraid? That we might feel this way again and again? I think I felt that way anyways. At least now I can feel the wind on a sunny spring day in the forest with my friend.