Relaxing the Senses
When we think of relaxation, we tend to focus on the breath, the mind and the muscles. But is it possible to relax the sense organs – and even the senses themselves? And could this be the key to helping people overcome trauma?
Sight, hearing, smell, taste and touch are the traditional five senses that are responsible for conveying information from the outside world to our brain. Their role is most often to stimulate – but our senses can be a powerful tool for relaxation as well.
“Relaxation by activating the senses is essentially activating the parasympathetic nervous system – the part of the nervous system that calms you down,” says clinical psychologist Manal Darwish. “It’s disconnecting you from your thoughts and reconnecting you with your body.”
Visualisation-style relaxation typically calls on each of the senses to create a multi-sensorial experience of calm. Typically, you are encouraged to picture in your mind a place that you consider calming – perhaps a forest or the beach – and then imagine all the smells, sounds and sights you may experience in that environment.
Meanwhile, mindfulness exercises – especially those for beginners – will often make use of just one single sense. “It is really important to start somebody off on the journey of connecting with their senses,” Darwish explains. “We ask people to eat a piece of chocolate – or a sultana – mindfully. Moving the piece of food from their tongue, chewing it and swallowing, can be a way to activate the senses and make sense of the information that comes from that.”
When employing the senses for mindfulness or relaxation purposes, there are no rights and wrongs. “You are not telling someone what to feel,” says Darwish. “It’s a non-judgemental attitude to what your body wants to give back.”
Still, for yoga teacher Jackie Wallin, visualisation hasn’t been her preferred relaxation method. “I know it speaks to a lot of people and I have had a few moments,” she says. “Everyone has different senses that are stronger – and for me, it’s feeling and touch.”
FLIPPING THE SWITCH
Rather than calling on the senses to help her and her students relax, Wallin saw the benefit of flipping the connection between the senses and relaxation. “We’re often encouraged to relax muscles, but not the sense organs and, beyond that, the senses themselves,” she explains.
Introduced to the idea of relaxing the sense organs by her teacher – New Zealand-based Donna Farhi, who has 35 years of practical yoga experience – Wallin found the concept radical. Her relaxation script now starts with
“It is really important to start somebody off on the journey of connecting with their senses.” MANAL DARWISH
the eyes, with prompts encouraging her class participants to first relax the eyelids, then the eyeballs, then the eye sockets. This is not theoretical relaxation – our eyeballs are moved by the contractions of six muscles (known as ‘extraocular muscles’), while the focusing of our eyes is controlled by the ‘ciliary’ muscle.
Though our eyes are in almost constant motion (even when they are focused on a single spot, our eyes will continue to drift slightly in order to provide the visual input required by the brain), relaxation isn’t something often associated with these organs. Indeed, to consciously relax the eyeballs is a somewhat surreal experience that can create a profound sense of relaxation.
Another sense organ that can respond well to relaxation is the mouth. Involved in taste as well as
smell, the mouth contains the hardworking tongue (which is made up of eight intertwined muscles that work together to enable the organ’s complex movements). It is also connected to an area in which many of us habitually hold high levels of tension – the jaw.
“Bring your attention to your mouth, lips parted slightly,” is how Wallin’s script encourages students to focus on the body part that is involved in so many of life’s little joys – eating, speaking, breathing and kissing. “Feel the interior of the mouth, moist and relaxed, relax the jaw and tongue…”
Though drooling may be a potential hazard of relaxing the mouth to this extent, there is much to be gained from focusing on this powerhouse sense organ. And the benefits extend beyond the specific organ itself – as the brain relies on our sense organs for information.
“The more you relax the organs, the more information you can feel in your body – and the more accurate information will be conveyed to the brain,” Wallin explains.
TACKLING TRAUMA
Wallin’s relaxation then focuses on relaxing the senses themselves. This concept will be familiar to those who have tried meditations that encourage observing the body’s sensations and experiences without judgement.
“Allow what you can hear to be perceived by the ears without either reaching out for, or deflecting sound,” the relaxation script suggests. Wallin elaborates: “You’re not looking for it, not chasing it. It is just there.”
For Darwish, the awareness of and use of the five senses is central to her work with people who have experienced significant trauma – but in a different way. “For the average individual, relaxation via the five senses is not necessarily a threatening or difficult task,” she says. “However, for a traumatised person, their senses may be associated with abuse.”
To provide some background, Darwish refers to a presentation by Janina Fisher, a clinical psychologist who’s worked in the field of trauma for over 25 years. Fisher notes that memories of trauma are encoded through our senses – rather than through our thoughts and words. “Memories of trauma are encoded sensorially, not linguistically,” is how Fisher describes the situation.
Dissociative symptoms – which occur when someone who is reliving a past trauma disconnects from their thoughts, feelings and even identity – can be short-circuited by using the senses as means of grounding. Sense can be a key to staying in the present, according to Fisher’s presentation.
Darwish explains further. “It’s not that they can’t do mindfulness or meditation – it’s just that their body has been in such a difficult place that they’ve learned to focus outwardly. To focus inwardly is to be engulfed by the trauma on a body sense level,” she says. “We need to be really gentle.”
BECOMING GROUNDED
In working with clients who have experienced trauma, the first sense that Darwish focuses on is touch. “I’m firstly getting an idea of whether they are even connected with their body and whether that’s a difficult thing to do,” she explains. “The way I ascertain that even without going into their detailed history is … with a grounding exercise – asking them to orient themselves to their body, simply noticing the feel of the chair and the connection of their feet to the ground.”
Hypervigilance is one common response to trauma – where people’s senses are involuntarily in a constant state of high alert. “There is a bias towards threat and the experience of stress,” explains Darwish. “Eyes darting around the room are part of a hypervigilant state, with pupils dilated and pronounced peripheral vision.” Darwish will encourage a hypervigilant client to focus their vision on one thing only. “Maybe my eyes – or, if that’s too intense, my shoes,” she says. “Then I’ll ask them to choose another spot and focus their eyes on that.”
This simple act of quietening the movement of the eye muscles can be a powerful disruptor of the fight-orflight state in which many who have suffered trauma constantly exist.
“The act of slowing down your eye movement is bio-feedback, hardwired to the brain,” Darwish explains. “The message is: ‘If I’m slowing down my eye movements, I must be safe.’”
The result is an induced sense of calm. It may not be the full relaxation that Wallin’s yoga students seek, but it’s at least a sense of being grounded.
Both Darwish and Wallin stress that the aim for using the senses as a tool for grounding or relaxation is not about losing awareness. “It is a fine balance of allowing movement but pacing it,” explains Darwish of her eye-focus grounding exercise. “It’s not about going into passivity,” says Wallin about her yoga-based relaxation. “You’re still consciously aware, you are alert in a relaxed way.”
THE NEXT STEP
For those seeking an even deeper experience of relaxing the senses, Darwish introduces two additional senses: the vestibular sense (our sense of movement and balance) and the proprioceptive sense (our awareness of our joint position and muscle stretch). “These are crucial too,” says Darwish. “I don’t just focus on sight, smell, taste, hearing and touch.” Pushing against the ground activates proprioception and releasing this push can activate a sense of calm.
Additionally, one of Wallin’s most powerful relaxation experiences was when she was encouraged to relax her brain. She stresses that this was not merely quietening her thoughts or encouraging a calm state of mind, but physically relaxing the brain.
While the brain is not usually defined as a sense organ (although Buddhism considers the mind, or intellect, to be one), it is where all our sensory information is received, analysed and interpreted.
Wallin remembers feeling surprised at the thought she could relax such a vital organ. “I thought, ‘What? I can do that?’” she recalls. “Then it was instantaneous, my brain just went ‘fzzt’ and I was in the most relaxed state I have ever experienced.”
Whether you use your senses to invoke calm or whether you’d like to try consciously relaxing your sense organs, you can tune into your senses to discover any tension they’re holding and what they are communicating to you about your wellbeing. Darwish sums up the power of relaxing your senses: “The more awareness we have of that particular sense – be it smell, taste, sight, touch or hearing – the more we can induce calm.”