Five senses meditation can totally shift your mood in just a few minutes
When you are caught between endless amounts of work, responsibilities and deadlines on one side and racing, anxious, ruminating and over analysing thoughts on the other, your mind and body get very stressed out.
To escape this trap, you need to interrupt it and powerfully redirect your attention to something that isn’t your thoughts or your to-do list. If you practice traditional mindfulness meditation, you may have noticed that meditation can be difficult to do or ineffective when you are in the midst of a stressed state. This is because you are trying to stop the mind with the mind, and it's difficult for calm thoughts to displace anxious thoughts. So as I like to say when you are losing your mind, find your body.
Five senses meditation is a delightfully different, super easy and amazingly effective approach to centring and soothing yourself, achieved by focusing on tuning into your body rather than the mind. Unlike traditional mindfulness which is largely about being a non-judgemental witnessing of your thoughts, the five senses meditation invites you to be an active participant in tuning into the richness of information coming to you via your eyes, ears, nose, taste and touch, and to notice how doing so profoundly shifts the state of both your mind and body.
Often, by tuning into your senses, the same thoughts you may struggle to quieten with traditional mindfulness practices effortlessly melt away as you immerse yourself in your senses. As an added bonus, the overwhelming majority of practitioners report that their body feels much more relaxed afterwards.
The five senses meditation achieves its unique outcomes because of the way your brain and nervous system work. Ultimately, your nervous system’s job is to keep you safe by looking out for dangers. For most of human evolution, it did this by using the five senses to determine if there were predators or other dangers around you. If your five senses detect no dangers, your mind and body relax. On the other hand, if it saw a tiger or smelled something rotten, it would turn on your stress response to ensure your survival. In the modern world, people rarely have to use their five senses and instead get stuck in their heads, and thoughts become the source of information that the nervous system uses to determine if they are safe or in danger. And as described above, your thought space is often very stressful!
When you redirect your attention from your thoughts to your body and the five senses, you start to flood your brain with information about the environment around you - just as it was designed to function. Your nervous system loves it! As the mind and body are allowed to soak in the information from your five senses, it is instantly regulating and soothing.
Moreover, usually the information around us signals safety to our brain and body. For example, as you open your eyes to take in the space around you, you may see a piece of art that pleases you, as you listen to the world around you, you may notice the singing of a bird and so on through all of your senses. The simultaneous interruption of your anxious thinking mind by focusing on your senses combined with the flow of pleasant sensory information can work wonders.
The only thing better than the practice itself is how easy it is to do! It requires no skill or practice, it simply asks you to place your attention on each of your senses and notice and enjoy how your mind and body respond. You may do the practice as often as you like, and you can spend as little as 30 seconds per sense (that's 2.5 minutes total) to experience a positive result.
How to do the five senses mediation
This exercise will guide you through an immersion into your five senses. As you proceed keep the following tips in mind.
Engage with the sense with lots of curiosity, as if you were noticing it for the first time.
Do not judge what you are perceiving, just perceive it.
Let your attention explore the ‘detail cues’ listed below for each sense.
Don’t rush
Find a comfortable position to sit or recline in. Take a moment to notice the quality of your mind (thoughts) and how your body feels before you begin. Score your level of stress from 1 to 10, 1 being the least stressed and 10 being maximum stress. After about 30 seconds, proceed through the following sensory prompts for 30 seconds to 2 minutes.
Eyes and Sight Bring all your attention to your eyes and look around your space with childlike curiosity, notice objects, colours, shapes, light and what draws you and let your eyes settle on something that you like. Take a few moments to feel what happens in your body.
Ears and Sound Next, bring all your attention to your ears as if you’d never heard a sound before and notice the world around you, notice details like loud or quiet, near or far, above you or below you, natural and mechanical. Take a few moments to feel what happens in your body as you indulge in hearing.
Nose and Smell Next, bring all your attention to your nose as if you had the snout of a dog and notice the scents around you including odours, moisture or dryness and air temperature. Take a few moments to feel what happens in your body as you immerse yourself in smell.
Tongue and Taste Next, bring all your attention to your tongue and mouth and notice the tastes and flavours, whether they are strong or faint, moist or dry, hot or cold. Take a few moments to feel what happens in your body as you focus on taste.
Touch and Felt Sense Lastly, bring all your attention to touch and the felt sense of your body. Notice the air on your skin, the texture of your clothes, surfaces you are in contact with, softness, hardness, stiffness or pliability of your muscles, the movement of breath. Take a few moments to feel what happens in your body as you get lost in your sense of touch and movement.
Rotate Finally, take the last minute to rotate through each sense again for 10 seconds. Smile and appreciate yourself for taking a few minutes to be kind to your mind and body. Then check back in with the quality of your mind (thoughts) and how your body feels. Re-score your stress from 1 to 10!
Karden Rabin is the co-author of The Secret Language of the Body out 23 May, and co-founder of Somia International
Get more wellness...
Self-compassion is not a fluffy fad - it can transform your relationship with yourself
'I walked 30 minutes a day for a month - here's what happened'
You Might Also Like
