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SENSE-UAL WRITING
(Cover Story, Science of Mind magazine, October 2006)

"We are coordinated with the outer world precisely through the sense organs, and in our senses, we have channels through which the outer world flows into us by way of the inner.”
– Rudolf Steiner, anthroposophist

Recently, on a spontaneous invitation from an old school friend, I visited the Big Island of Hawaii. During a 6 a.m. run along Kona’s boardwalk, while thinking about my forthcoming re-entry into a world filled with projects and deadlines, the island exploded upon my senses. My thoughts were replaced by scents of pikake and plumeria, which took me back to many delicious memories of past trips to Hawaii, where I promoted surfing events during the late 1980s. The road gave way to observations of the lava fields that laid the volcanic foundation of this and every other town on the Big Island. It felt primeval … the first days of Earth. The pounding of unusually large waves roared in my ears. My cells filled to bursting.

Suddenly, just another morning run became a moment forever imbedded in my body and memory. I spent the next two hours writing about returning to Earth’s inception, and the purity of original thought and original nature that surged within my body.

Peak vacation moments offer astute reminders in this information- and advertising-saturated world that as human beings, we thrive best when combining our gifts of mind and senses. They remind us that we are sense-ual beings, full of feeling and perception, and that our senses are not only tools for survival, but also observatories laden with insight, and couriers between the physical and spiritual worlds. They express and impress the “little minds,” our cells, within a larger mind, our body and brain. Along with conscious thought, senses are the bodily vehicles and foundation of what Religious Science and Science of Mind founder Ernest Holmes termed “the science of the subjective mind.”

Try it for yourself. Harken back to the last vacation you took. Return to that place in your mind, and remember the cacophony of sounds, smells, sights, tastes, peoples, locally-produced goods, alleys, mountains, rivers and sense of cultural history that existed there. Put down your cameras and brochures for a second, call to mind a particular moment that you can still feel in your body, and see if you re-live it entirely through your senses. What do you smell? What is the movement on the street or in the forest like? Any particular tastes floating from nearby cafes? How do the noises blend in?

The senses offer perfect vehicles for writing about our deepest experiences, challenges, issues, memories and areas that require healing and consideration. If you’re looking for a lost memory that can connect two portions of your adolescence, you can recall a certain smell of that time – and the olfactory sense will often connect the dots. If you walk into the mountains and sit by a gurgling stream, you may recall the time you went fishing with your father – and open the floodgates to wonderful, healing memories. If you hear someone speak in a Southern dialect, you might sink into a cushioned porch chair on a sultry summer night, and write about the deepening comfort you feel. If you feel your stomach clench, you might write about the circumstances that created that movement – and discover a healthier alternative.

Along with prayer and meditation, writing from the senses anchors the union of mind and body. It can produce your deepest, most authentic stories, poems, journal entries, letters, lyrics, articles and plays.

Sensuality and Sexuality Not Mutually Exclusive

The notion that sensual = sexual is a misconception of a modern culture and society with daily pressures and moral and ethical ambiguities that often stifle or repress our ability to feel and experience life completely. Sensuality and sexuality are not mutually exclusive; rather, they are two sides of the vital coin of deepest honoring of, connection to and relationship with our bodies – the minds beyond our brains. The greatest, wisest spiritual minds of the past two centuries – Ernest Holmes, Johann Wolfgang Goethe, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Mary Baker Eddy, Rudolf Steiner, Alice Bailey, Paramahansa Yogananda and others – certainly didn’t fall into this theocratic sensual = sexual trap. For a writer, sensuality—expression of the senses—is synonymous with breathing. If we don’t convey the interplay of senses, our work will shrivel and crack like a Death Valley lake bed in July. Stories live in a writer’s sensual world. Readers take these experiences into their bodies, minds and lives.

We use our senses to experience a moment; how does it affect us? How does it move us? The easiest way to engage a reader is to welcome them into your story through their own senses – accomplished only by sharing your sensory perceptions. This is why 90% of all opening scenes in books and movies are dramatic and filled to bursting with sensory experience.

Throughout our lives, we’ve operated on the notion of five senses – sight, hearing, smell, taste and touch. Let’s expand that into something more indicative of the totality of our existence. Famed Austrian anthroposophist, philosopher and educator Rudolf Steiner described the intelligence of human design through 12 senses, now taught to students in the Waldorf School system he inspired. Another great mind of the later 20^th century, poet-philosopher Michael McClure, postulated a theory of 27 senses – 12 perceptible, 15 imperceptible.

Steiner broke the 12 senses into two categories: Body and Soul Senses (Life/Well-Being, Touch, Taste, Sight/Vision, Balance, Thought, Movement, Smell) and Social-Future-Mind Senses (Speech/Language, Warmth/Temperature, Hearing, Ego/The Other). The sense of thought? The sense of speech/language? Consider: When one person speaks to you with mellifluous native Hawaiian words like maukaor lei, and another addresses you in officious corporate verbiage like organization and aggregation, do you not feel and think differently?

Taken separately, we can use each of the 12 senses to write volumes about the world around and within us. When the dozen senses are combined, we can literally use sense-ual writing, contemplation and action to improve our health, increase our potential and transform our lives. We’ve just entered the deeper nature of ourselves. “Right here, through our own nature, is the gateway and the path that gradually leads to illumination, to realization, to inspiration, to the intuitive perception of everything,” Ernest Holmes wrote.

Quick Guide to Writing with the 12 Senses

• Life/Well-Being: Is your subject happy? Sad? Downcast? Upbeat? Show the sense of well-being with a glance, a comment, a posture. Do you wake up feeling joyful? Morose? Worried? Do you jump out of bed? Or hit the “snooze” button and pull the covers over your head? Show those feelings through facial expressions, actions and earliest thoughts.

• Touch: Use your characters’ or narrator’s hands fingers to touch your readers, and reach out and grab them. Touch often with your words; let us feel what you feel when you pet an animal or touch the herbs in your garden.

• Balance: Balance can be conveyed in a physical, emotional, mental or spiritual sense. Are you or your characters balanced in their lives? Their actions? Their way of walking? Convey balance or lack of through what people say or how they perceive their world. When journaling, examine your own sense of balance in the activities of your daily live.

• Movement: How does a person move? Upright and rigid, or with knees bent in a loping gait? Hurriedly, sluggishly or with calm focus? Do you scamper? Or do you stop to observe the beauty around you? Movement speaks volumes about one’s inner character and level of stress.

• Smell: Smell is the unsung hero of all senses, the gateway to cellular and body memory. “The tiny point of the cell grows out, as it were, into the whole being of man,” Steiner said in a 1922 lecture. You can contact old experiences and dreams, entice readers, create instant focus and presence and enliven the body with a well-placed scent. Smell is the highway to our feminine nature and its softer, deeper, more mysterious insinuations, which is why kitchen and cooking scenes are literature and movie staples.

• Taste: Think of taste not as “salty,” “bitter,” “sweet,” “sour” or “astringent,” but as a vehicle of association—“the orange tasted like a plunge into a swampy Florida grove.” Also, taste refers to one’s preference for style and the words one chooses. When you taste something in your writing, let us taste with you. .

• Sight/Vision: What you see and how you see it are critical—you are the eyes of your stories, journals, books and articles. Steiner went further, however: He described vision as a sense. What are your aspirations? Your dreams? Your visions? Trust the images that come to you. “The eye is formed in the Light and for the Light,” Goethe wrote, to which Steiner added in a talk, “When you speak of the ‘look’ of a man, you mean the life of soul that comes out to meet you through his eyes.” That’s what all writers seek to convey – whether writing books or facilitating their own personal healing and understanding.

• Thought: A core teaching of Science of Mind – subjective thought – is also a core sense in the Steiner philosophy. If you’re a writer, you’re good at thought—maybe too good. For many, the biggest challenge is to get “out of the head” and not become overly analytical or intellectual. Be subjective. Use thought to expose us to your subject’s world and its possibilities and limitations. Show how you or your characters work their way into and out of decision-making situations.

• Speech/Language: Whispering, yelling, even-voiced talking, getting to the point or whining convey different emotions and circumstances. We respond distinctly to each. Show this in your dialogue. This includes interior dialogue and the unspoken thoughts between spoken words. Furthermore, consonants denote the language of the outer world (Earth), while vowels represent the inner world (Heaven). One can sense the spiritual sense of an entire culture by their native tongue – for example, most native American languages, and native Hawaiian speech, are driven by vowels.

• Hearing: Hearing incorporates wordly sounds and takes us into the inner worlds of ourselves or our characters. Descriptions of favorite music, nature sounds or the reaction to honking horns shows us how we or others relate to the world. Hearing and touch also produce the best action verbs, which moves stories along.

• Warmth/Temperature: Some people are called “hot-blooded;” others are “cold-blooded.” What characteristics do you associate with these descriptions? Gain the measure of one’s sense of warmth and temperature: Is your protagonist a snow sports fanatic? Does the Upper East Side debutante flee to Florida in the winter? Is the room warmer or colder when someone walks in?

• Ego/The Other: Is your character or subject confident? Arrogant? Depressed? Self-absorbed? Concerned with others? Dutiful? The sense of ego/the other is the sum total of a person’s characteristics. Let actions and dialogue convey this sense in your writing: Show us, don’t tell us.

When you write with conscious awareness of the 12 senses, marvelous things happen. The quality of your writing grows, self-awareness expands, thought deepens through greater body-mind connections, and stories and snippets of life come tumbling forth in droves. The world around you enlivens, no matter where you sit. The potential to connect to your deepest, innermost issues, secrets, emotions and memories increases.

Most of all, the conscious application of the 12 senses in writing often effects self-healing. I watched a writing student eliminate the energetic cause of her breast cancer in three months by using her pen to transform her sense of thought (she considered herself too conventional), movement (she moved rigidly), balance (she held everything inside; there was no outside expression) and ego/the other (she forgave her ex-husband for his abuses). She used the five conventional senses to dig into these deeper senses.

Once healed, she left her corporate job to become a freelance writer. She now conveys her experiences to readers seeking greater meaning in their lives. In her case, sense-ual writing and the relationship with her 12 senses changed her inner and outer world. That can happen for all of us.

BOB YEHLING, an occasional Science of Mind magazine contributor, is the author of several works that include Writes of Life: Using Your Life Experiences in Everything You Write and Write Deep, Heal Deep (both Koboca Publishing). He teaches writing and creativity workshops throughout the United States.