Experiments with Sensory Living
The story of the thing is not the thing
“Priyanka Chopra takes a dig at Hasan Minhaj after he jokes about not following Malala Yousafzai…” Sophie Zhang thinks a tiny indie Indian newshouse is making unfalsifiable claims against the giant corporation she blew the whistle on. 10 tips to 5x your reach! 4 ways to cold-email effectively! Like shards of glass from outer space, hundreds of stories hurl themselves at my groggy Sunday morning brain from my dark-mode Twitter.
I light the stove and set up the moka pot, slowly boil some fresh milk, and potter about the kitchen looking for coffee mugs. My seemingly coagulated grey matter is slowing down all cognitive function. I refresh the Twitter feed to make sense of Zhang’s comments, but it turns out Malala and Priyanka have taken custody over my only awake brain cells. Hasan was obviously joking. And so too Malala. Wait, what, so why is Priyanka calling Hasan petty? Who’s being petty now?! I am so deeply consumed by making sense of what’s going on in the world of A-Listers and their Instagram friendships, when I get my first hit of coffee.
This bitter, chicory-heavy, sensory routine is powerful. It takes me beyond the insides of my head and the surface of the screen and out into the world. I register the cold floor pushing against my feet, the hot mug in my palms, the soreness of one-too-many deadlifts in my lower back, and the feeling of peace from uninterrupted even if short sleep… but something is odd in my upper back…
Recentering myself into my body is a Work In Progress for me. But first, a little story about how I got here.
I was the 21 year old who felt Peter Gabriel’s gorgeously raspy My Body is a Cage in my bones, when I heard it on TV the first time.
My body truly felt like a cage. I never danced (the secret code for sexy moves was never revealed to me), I struggled in relationships (I hated touch, I hated being touched), gyms were the worst, the ones with mirrors on all their walls even more so (this body is not capable of beauty or sport), and I wore clothes designed to render me into a wallflower (what’s the best way to disappear in a world that compels appearance). Whatever I saw, I never saw anything. Where others spotted the purple-orange sunset in the Ulsoor lake or the warm, golden, tree-lined university promenades in the night light, I found a receding water-body, a crowded road, and the prospect of too much drama to be out and about in public sight. Where my friends experienced viscerally, the shared comedy, angst and gore of coming of age together at university, I only have a disembodied fog of memorylessness.
I lived so much in unconscious and entirely made up stories about belonging, love, femininity, sexiness, sport, politics, and status, that I hardly ever lived in my body. I would go on to learn, years later, that I was dissociative. My body was going into a freeze state under high anxiety and robbing me of the gift of memory.
At 24, something awoke in me. It was the day I set my eyes upon a fire-pink bougainvillaea, wildly and irreverently disrupting the facade of some official-looking Delhi building on the way to work. I was so struck by this sight that I parked my car, jumped out and clicked a dozen photos of this utterly ordinary thing of beauty (to my-then boyfriend’s consternation; it was much too early in the workday for this level of whimsy).
This 8 AM photograph was the first in a long line of sensational sensory experiences that have stayed with me. Like the time I jumped off a boat into a hot spring in Europe in 2014. And my first time driving at 80mph on an American expressway, 2016. Each time I set fire to the dance floor at friends’ weddings, 2017-20. My first competitive run, last year. My first dunk in the crystal-clear and frigid Atlantic ocean, in July. My first hike in the Himalayas, last week.
The great thing about handing somewhat high-end phone-cameras to folks like me who have few - if any - memories of their younger years, is that it allowed me to intentionally build a memory bank of moments of sensory awe that I wanted to be sure to remember.
The camera compels attention to the line between the thing, and the story one wants to tell about it, through framing, lighting and angles. And my greatest learning from obsessively taking photos was: the story of the thing is not the thing.
Sensations that stayed with me as fresh, unfiltered and immersive memories - in VR that could give Oculus a run for its money - stayed because they were real. They were raw to my sight, sound, and touch. Unlike all the stories made up about them, either unconsciously in our heads, or consciously through the camera.
An arresting sensory experience is the antidote for the mind’s stories. But the project of remaining in my body - especially through high tumult, where the stories can themselves take over and numb my body - has taken conscious and ritualised work of both body and mind.
I think of it as living in the world in a posture of samasthiti, or standing with awareness. At the level of my body, I have tried a playful mix of movement, the outdoors, breath-awareness, cold water, aromas, music and touch, to press reset on my inner-state and become more conscious. Some of my more fun experiments have involved befriending the barbell, stripping and jumping into pools, lakes and oceans with careless abandon, and just staring at beautiful things. Lifting releases happy chemicals, water calms me, and staring at beauty forces me to stay with my breath. Of course, with A Listers’ Instagram drama, it turns out coffee cuts it… and it hits home: my upper back is scrunched up in stress about the young South Asian icons not getting along! Jeez.
At the level of my mind, I try not to get very deep into the recesses of my head. With the help of people far wiser and cleverer, such as spiritual thinker Jiddu Krishnamurthi who refused to be known as a guru, and the psychologist and master-mediator Marshall Rosenberg who heard the need that was hidden behind the violent words of angry people, I now have a simple practice to spot my unconscious stories: distinguishing observation1 - what I see, hear, or touch with my sensory perception of the thing - from judgement2 - how it looked, sounded, or felt in my cognitive or emotional experience.
For me, this means holding the awareness that only the thing is in the real world. The meaning of it and the conscious and unconscious stories about it get made up in our heads. Here is where it dawns on me that Hasan’s Instagram reel and Malala’s words in response are not things my head needs to make meaning of. It also means consciously stepping out of the stories conjured up by my little head, and instead, to just perch on a ledge beside them and watch them curiously. In this liminal space between mind and body, I wonder what I can learn about myself, from getting so invested in the friendship of a random set of celebrities in the South Asian diaspora…
After this, I just let my body guide me. This piece got written in much the same way. After many days of hand-wringing and head-wrangling, when no spiky perspectives called out to me, I opened up a blank doc and just let my hands type what my body had. All I want to say about this is: the universe’s mysteries probably all began sounding this woo-woo before we began to understand them!
Of course, I am not the only person in the world who has chanced upon and unearthed some mind-body insights. Yet, I remain evangelical about connecting with ourselves through our bodies, only because my experience of the world through my body can only be mine. And how singular and unique each of us is in experiencing life and our worlds through our bodies is an infinitely more interesting story than the ones we all unconsciously share in, consume, and inhabit together.
Observations are statements about the thing as it occurred. They are objective as they are verifiable by others who also witnessed it.
Judgements include the framing, the story, or the meaning about the thing. They are subjective as they can vary from person to person.
This is such a luscious and sensory strewn romp into the joy of embodied life that I find it hard to imagine you've had struggles connecting with your terrestrial self. I loved these rich descriptions of your experience. I especially loved the distinction you shared about there being a difference between the simple glory of manifest existence, its simple nature, and on the other hand the illusory mental fog that tends to add all sorts of meaning and interpretation that doesn't belong there, and separate us from the numinous in the process. I've signed up for your next one. Glad I stopped in here to see this.