Build Resilience: Wake Up Your Senses

Nourish, enliven, and activate your system using your senses. Explore a more conscious sensory experience by learning the practices below to wake up your senses and support your mood.

The focus of the following practices is to awaken your senses in ways that can help you feel more energized and connected. 

Wake Up Your Senses

Three strategies to focus on:

Smell & Aromatherapy

Why: Inhaling aromatherapy scents can stimulate or soothe your system and provide a way to come alive in new and different ways. 

Specific action: Take just one minute daily to focus on smelling something that you enjoy. Give your full attention to the smell and notice how your system responds. 

Not sure what to smell? Try an aromatherapy product, a flower, fruit, or another natural element.

Touch & Sensory Experience

Why: It's easy to get consumed by all the things happening around you. Those constant pulls of attention can mean that you lose a sense of awareness and connection to your body. Touch can help bring attention back to the body in nourishing ways. 

Specific Action: Like the aromatherapy meditation, you can simply take one minute daily and give your full attention to this sensory experience. Focusing on your hands, feet, or your body laying on the ground can feel most balancing. If you're able, consider getting a massage this month or create a backrub train at your next family or friend gathering (seriously!).

Listen & Training Brain Waves

Why: Sound creates powerful responses in body and mind.

Specific Action: Check out music that is scientifically designed to train the brain waves to certain “frequencies” just by listening to it (called “audioentrainment”). It can help to facilitate sleep, focus, and creativity. Other sounds and music that you find enjoyable and calming can be used as well. Like the other challenge options, simply spend one minute fully-focused on the sound of your choice. 

RELATED ARTICLE

Go Deeper With Your 19 Senses

In order to wake up your senses, it’s important to understand them a bit better. You probably learned about the five senses in health class: touch, smell, hearing, seeing, and taste. One appealing and straight-forward quality of the five-sense model is that each of the senses is paired with a specific, highly visible part of the body. You can point to your eyes, ears, mouth, nose, and skin. However, depending on how you define the human sense organs, functions, and abilities; there may be many more senses beyond just five. And you can access them! Read more.