H
ave you ever seen a cat get up from a nap? It will stretch out its front legs till its belly touches the floor. Then, if it feels so inclined, it may arch up its back and hold the position for a second and then go about its daily business. What a quick and perfect treatment this seems to be. No strain, no need for special instruction…only a basic response to a felt need. What do animals know that we have forgotten? The dictionary defines kinesthesia as “the sense whose end organs lie in the muscles, tendons, and joints and are stimulated by bodily tensions; the muscle sense.” Clearly here is another sense that we know little about and that we rarely consider when we count our other senses of sight, hearing, taste, smell and touch. We do not include or know about our kinesthetic sense because most of us have lost touch with this deep, inner sense. The kinesthetic sense is a lost sense that becomes conscious usually when tension or dis- ease becomes so advanced that we cannot ignore it anymore. The kinesthetic sense is often misconstrued to mean simply
a sense of movement or else a sense of our body in space. These are peripheral aspects of the kinesthetic sense; in fact the “muscle sense” is most clearly experienced when the body is not moving, but at rest or else moving quite slowly. Some discussions of this inner body sense even go so far as to imply that it is always uncon- scious. How far have we come from that cat simply feeling and responding to its bodily needs?
Where then is this kinesthetic sense and what does it feel like? What is this new world, this unexplored territory of internal sensa- tion, this life of deep feeling beneath our skin in muscle, tendons, and joints? The kinesthetic sense is buried under thousands of years of
civilization and human conditioning. The direction that civilization has taken us is away from an awareness of our physical depths and towards a greater awareness and understanding of the world and universe outside of ourselves. We have become masters of the world and strangers to ourselves. Eastern cultures have not forgotten this inner life, and so in
India yoga has been developed and practiced for thousands of years. From China, Taoism and T’ai Chi have preserved and explored this inner world of the kinesthetic sense. Eastern born practices charac- teristically call for a quieting of the mind and a turning of conscious-
32 Natural Nutmeg April 2014
ness towards the inside of the body. What has come to be called the unconscious or even the id or libido in Western psychology is really only a vague and distant understanding of the flows and blocks of internal energy that yoga and Taoism have studied, in detail, for thousands of years. Unfortunately the descriptions that have come down to us from these Eastern practices are not always very clear or comprehensible. They are often in poetic or coded language, and they can mean next to nothing to a people steeped in the rigors of logic and scientific explanations. About all we can glean from these Eastern literatures is that something is being felt inside the body and this feeling sometimes moves around inside the body. What is clear is that if we should learn to still the abstract mind and reduce the stimulation from our other senses, eventually this internal and physi- cal universe will make itself known. The grip of tension is often our first introduction to the kines- thetic sense. Like the dawning of a new day, our specific and real tensions rise up and fill our consciousness. Where we may first feel this tension is an individual matter.
Some people feel it in their faces, some in their legs, and oth- ers in the belly or the back. We may feel the tension as a gripping sensation that will not let go or else as a steady, heavy pressure on a part of our body that will not abate. At last we know something is very wrong and can actually feel the problem. This powerful sense of our disease, of our tension and stiffness, becomes a guide. Our lives may forever be changed by an awareness of the kinesthetic sense. We are not so fooled anymore. Our discomforts, mankind’s discomfort, become conscious and clear.
Kinesthesia As Guide Discovering the kinesthetic sense is a breakthrough in a yoga
practice. Years can be spent in meditation or doing special exercises before the kinesthetic sense becomes more fully conscious. We are so seduced by every other aspect of life (sights, sounds, thoughts) that our basic inner condition is really deep in hiding. Yet when the kinesthetic sense does finally dawn on us life is changed. We have found a true guide. The athlete learns a skill or practices a form that is external to himself and that he tries to eventually master through practice.
The Kinesthetic Sense
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