Innersense is the natural human state: all senses engaged and experienced as one. It is effortless, impersonal seeing, listening, tasting, smelling and smiling with the subtle, warm, open aliveness of the whole body. There is no concept of time and no separation; only fullness in emptiness – wholeness now.
Innersense is the innocence of babies,
before becoming adulterated by the human condition. It remains the ground of our being; the unheard and unseen silent presence which pervades every aspect of experience.
Have a sense that you are completely submerged in your body from head to feet, present in its warm aliveness. Let go of the habit of perceiving the body from the perspective of the head and give yourself up to the invitation of its gravity.
Feel this gravity; the subtle, tingly aliveness of the body calling to you to enter and fill it. Smile as if the whole body is smiling.
Innersense is immediate experience. As you remain submerged in the overall subtle, tingly aliveness of your body, notice that the distinction between body and environment begins to fade. It’s as if you’re seeing and listening with your whole body and your body itself is a formless field of aliveness, not separate in any way from its environment. You are fully present in your body, but not limited to it.
In fact everything is in you; you are one with your body and experience, yet transcend it all. You are the unknowable origin of all things; here, now as always, absolutely present, though completely hidden from any perspective of experience, as you have no form. It could be said that the Universe is your game – hide and seek with imaginary aspects of yourself. You’ll never find yourself in experience because you’re already absolutely here, not in or out there.
Babies are effortlessly centred in the body’s natural centre of gravity; the place the Chinese call the lower tan tien. This is located about 2 inches below the navel, level with the hip bones. Being centred in the tan tien ensures that every aspect of the body’s intelligence works harmoniously together and we experience this as feeling naturally positive and happy. We are able to ride the waves of emotion and winds of thought, which are part of the human experience, while remaining calm and unattached.
As we mature into young children and learn language, we begin to view aspects of our present, holistic experience as separate objects. Also around this time our emotional response becomes stronger and we start to become conditioned by our parents’ ideas of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ emotions. We learn to tense up internally around ‘bad’ emotions in resistance to them and ‘good’ emotions in an attempt to prolong them. This causes us to shift our internal focus upwards away from the lower tan tien, to whichever emotion we are feeling. We begin to to define ourselves through the emotions we feel and lose touch with the peace of our being.
When we are centred in the belly, our breathing is natural, easy and relaxed. The belly is the bellows of the body, designed to gently expand and contract, to draw air in and out of the lungs. As our centre of awareness is raised into the solar plexus or chest, breathing is adversely affected and this in turn has a negative effect upon our mental, emotional and physical state.
Much of the unhappiness of the human condition is simply the result of not being fully ‘in our bodies’. When I am present in Innersense, I am one with my body, while remaining free from identification with it.
Relax into belly centred Innersense. There is nothing to do or manipulate, simply the non-invasive re-training of your body’s intelligence back into its natural state.
Don’t try to control your breathing in any way. By relaxing your awareness into the lower belly you allow the body to remember its natural breathing rhythm. Let the body breathe itself – it knows best.
As you begin to experience from Innersense, remain open in the space around you. This prevents you from overly identifying with your body, which causes tension and anxiety. These unpleasant sensations are nature’s way of indicating to you that something is wrong; that the energy of life is being dammed, instead of being allowed to flow in its own natural way.
Have a sense that your awareness is filling the space in your environment, so that you have a relaxed, overall view of your experience. Observe that your body is part of the experience and continue to remain open in the space.
Don’t think about this, as thinking is abstraction or conceptualisation. The purpose of thought is to take things out of context of the whole. This is very useful when solving a practical problem such as working out an itinerary, but is superfluous to perception itself.
Do you see that normal human perception is loaded down with concepts which are habitually applied to experience? Do you see that in the absence of these concepts or thought forms, you are naked, innocent Presence?
Remember to smile with your whole body, belly centred in Innersense.
