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Aug. 25th, 2005
feeling your skin
Aug. 25th, 2005 04:05 pmI've been reading this book, Waking the Tiger, for about a month. ( about the book )
Many of the exercises early in the book focus on what he calls the "felt sense". It's a combination of conscious and unconscious awareness of sensation/feeling and a sense of yourself as a body occupying a space. [Other people call it "kinaesthetic sense" or "kinaesthetic awareness", which I like more cause I don't get to type a and e next to each other very often; it's a nice, but underused, dipthong (I might even go so far as to say I'm a dipthong aesthete, ha!).] In fact, one of the first things is just concentrating on getting that sense back.
Quite awhile ago, I was on the DC metro thinking about this. I can't feel all my skin. In fact, most of us can't feel all our skin. It's normal (having a base in anatomy as well as psychology, if I recall correctly) - partly just that we couldn't continue to function in a complicated world if we were consciously aware of every inch of skin, and partly that we're almost all a little broken. Despite the usefulness of numbness, it made me suddenly and utterly sad. Like there was this relationship with my skin that I could imagine but never have. I stopped reading the book, because it started to make me really sad about my skin.
But.
There are some limited contexts where you can get pretty intimate with your skin. When it's hurt or injured (from a sunburn to scars and real pain). On a really fabulously sunny, half-or-all-naked day. If you touch someone new.
It was a nice insight for me, that we were just apart, not totally estranged.
Many of the exercises early in the book focus on what he calls the "felt sense". It's a combination of conscious and unconscious awareness of sensation/feeling and a sense of yourself as a body occupying a space. [Other people call it "kinaesthetic sense" or "kinaesthetic awareness", which I like more cause I don't get to type a and e next to each other very often; it's a nice, but underused, dipthong (I might even go so far as to say I'm a dipthong aesthete, ha!).] In fact, one of the first things is just concentrating on getting that sense back.
Quite awhile ago, I was on the DC metro thinking about this. I can't feel all my skin. In fact, most of us can't feel all our skin. It's normal (having a base in anatomy as well as psychology, if I recall correctly) - partly just that we couldn't continue to function in a complicated world if we were consciously aware of every inch of skin, and partly that we're almost all a little broken. Despite the usefulness of numbness, it made me suddenly and utterly sad. Like there was this relationship with my skin that I could imagine but never have. I stopped reading the book, because it started to make me really sad about my skin.
But.
There are some limited contexts where you can get pretty intimate with your skin. When it's hurt or injured (from a sunburn to scars and real pain). On a really fabulously sunny, half-or-all-naked day. If you touch someone new.
It was a nice insight for me, that we were just apart, not totally estranged.