T E R R Y R A Y
Sensory Awareness
What Happens in a Sensory Awareness Class?
What it looks like from the outside:
In Sensory Awareness classes, we learn to shift our focus from our minds to our bodies. We enliven and reawaken the sense doors, bringing mindfulness to simple movements and everyday activities.
The teacher or leader suggests experiments for the participants to investigate and explore. She asks questions, directing and reminding everyone to continually return to their immediate, tangible experience.
The task is usually an ordinary event such as lifting a small stone, bringing a hand to one’s head, touching another person, lying on one’s side, walking backwards or one of a million other simple acts. Sometimes the eyes are closed. The activity can be playful and interactive or quiet and inward.
The experiments are non-conceptual, non-intellectual and generally non-verbal. They are an invitation to arrive in present time, with fresh responsiveness to this particular situation. They point us to ourselves.
Fruits of Practice
For more information about the Sensory Awareness Foundation go to www.sensoryawareness.org
Somatic investigation is a mindfulness practice in which each person makes discoveries in their own time and their unique way, but everyone becomes more connected with themselves, with others and with their environment.
We discover:
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Our hardened attitudes, beliefs and ways of relating are locked in our musculature and habitual patterns of movement. When these become conscious, they change to a more free and natural way of being.
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Physical and emotional stresses release, naturally on their own, as we sense how we are falling into habitual patterns and limiting ourselves.
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Mental, emotional and physical healings happen in and through practice. Sensing is more inclusive than therapy or other healing modalities. There isn’t a particular goal or outcome that we are striving towards. What needs to unfold is often more meaningful to us than what we thought we wanted.
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As we shift our attention to our direct perception, we come into the fullness of embodied presence and a more holistic and natural way of being in the world.
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We discover deeper layers of contractions and often-subtle tensions or numb or ‘lifeless’ places in us.
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We arrive at a more natural ease and peace. At the same time we are revitalized, energized, and we experience all of life more fully. We become, literally, more in touch with ourselves.
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Life becomes immediate.
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As we wake up and become conscious in our embodied presence, we become more appropriately responsive and awaken to profound levels of insight, wisdom and love in us.
5 Month Intensive Training
May 19, 2019-November 3, 2019
Going Deeper
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