Mental Skills Training Secrets Hidden in Plain View
Life, and everything you do, has so many layers to it.
Like even when you’re present, what are you present to? Attention is limited, finite. And your experience of the present moment is going to be remembered in the way you experienced it.
Imagine, you’re sitting in a class and a teacher is lecturing. One student is doodling a doodle. Another student is staring at the clock. Another one is taking notes.
Each student will have their own experiences and memories of the lecture. Some might say a lecture was boring, challenging, time dragged on. Others might find it was life transforming, engaging, time flew by.
Just like how things can be remembered in different ways, there are different ways of being present. And they all have something to do with your senses.
Because being present has layers to it, one of the best things to do is practice sensing your different senses.
Sometimes you might want to bask in one sense over another, and other times you might find solutions to problems by checking in with a different sense.
What I want to share with you today is a reliable way to practicing this ongoing sensory awareness, which is basically scanning.
It’s not some mysterious thing, but it is often overlooked because of how straight forward and simple it is.
And you can start from any sense. What senses are you being present to right now? You may have the awareness of what you’re seeing or hearing, your breathing, the feeling of your clothes, or the contact points with what you’re sitting or standing on.
And because attention is limited, you’re not going to be aware of everything all the time (and that’s a good thing, otherwise it would just be too much).
So, to strengthen your connection to the present moment and improve your ability to process information more precisely, you might choose to consciously scan through your senses from time to time.
This is a brief introduction to scanning through your senses. Adjust the pacing as you see fit.
There are some practices that linger on one layer of sensory scanning for 20 minutes or more. But we’ll just breeze right through them.
A body scan might start with simply sensing what you sense as you turn your attention to your body.
You might then notice where your body feels relaxed, where feels tense. Continuing noticing relaxation and tension from the top of your head all the way through to your toes.
And maybe you pause a moment to give time to sense a specific part of your body before continuing on to the next area. Head, shoulders, arms, fingers, chest, belly, legs, toes.
You might have an awareness of your breathing. Checking in with yourself, what is the quality of this breathing?
Just gently noticing with soft attention.
You might notice the temperature, doing a body scan sensing for warm or cool.
You can notice the sounds around you, doing a sound scan of your environment. What are the sounds, their qualities, how near or far are they, what’s the source of the sound?
You may notice the colors, textures, shapes, and sizes of things in your environment by doing a slow and smooth visual scan. With soft eyes, pausing on one thing, noticing the quality you notice, maybe naming that quality, resting your eyes there for a moment, and then moving on with the visual scanning.
As a brief overview, that’s what it is.
You have lots of different kinds of senses. A sense of hunger or fullness, your center of gravity, time, balance, position in space, posture, depth, lightness, and many more.
To train your mind, you can make it a practice sensing your different senses.
To share with you the simple advanced version, beyond scanning, you might practice expanded awareness. Expanded awareness is sensing and processing what you are seeing, hearing, feeling, and your breathing all at once.
It might feel easy or difficult, this expanded awareness. And you might have your own opinions about it. But now you know that it exists as something you can practice.
Practice scanning through your senses and expanded awareness and you will improve your ability to be more present and process information more precisely and accurately.
Thank you for reading. I hope these insights help you on your journey to mental skills mastery.
