touching without feeling
toggling between disembodiment and sensual connection
(It’s a little silly, but I had this song in my head while I was writing this.)
How many things do you think your body has made contact with today? Take a moment and go through the archive of your day—where you were, how you moved, what you did and interacted with.
How many of the things you touched did you actually feel?
I recently blew my own mind with this question. When I thought about the sheer number of things I touch in a day that I don’t actually feel, it made me curious about how often I go without feeling the connection I make with the world on a daily basis.
Like, right now. I’m sitting on my couch, typing on my computer. As I type, I have no awareness of where my feet are or my back is or the sensation of the keys at the tip of my fingers. I don’t have any connection to my body beyond the movement of my hands and a feeling behind my eyes. When I check in, touch isn’t the only sensation I’m not aware of. I’m not aware of any of my other senses either, though I have a vague awareness of music playing from my speaker. But my other senses have disappeared or dulled.
This disappearing and dulling of the senses is what happens when we’re on autopilot and for me, the experience of this mimics the sensation of dissociation I feel when I’m activated or having a hard mental health day—a feeling of not having a body, of not being fully present in the world around me. This (dissociation) is a useful protective mechanism, one that has kept me safe during unsafe moments in my life. I never wish to badmouth dissociation, or even going on autopilot. Both are something we must do to get things done and survive. But if we’re always practicing something, I’m interested in interrogating the practices that we do from impulse or habit, and exploring different ways of being in my body that counter those reflexes.
That exploration is what helps me gain a greater capacity to have different embodied experiences and gives me access to more choice in how I want to be and feel.
And I want to feel more, not less.
It’s not often we get to consciously experience a felt-sense of disembodiment. Usually, we’re moving way too fast to even know that we have a body, let alone to discern when we’ve dropped out of contact with ourselves. But that question that blew my mind—how many of the things I touched today did I actually feel?—brings that awareness (or lack of) front and center. That question is a teacher that guides me into curiosity, into the How of my disconnect, even when it’s benign. It tells me, “When I am on autopilot, like typing on my computer or driving in my car, I lose contact with myself. I become a head on a stick.”
Perhaps you’re experiencing something similar right now. As you’re reading this, which parts of your body do you feel, and which parts do you not? Which of your senses are activated, and which ones are completely offline?
When I ask these questions to myself, I ask them from a place of curiosity, to glean information to help me know where I go when I’m not in my body and to come back to myself. It’s also useful for me to make the times when I’m on my computer or driving my car a space for me to practice more embodiment. Like, now that I know what disembodiment feels like while I do this thing, what does it feel like to do it with a little more feeling?
This is something I’ve been exploring while teaching my sensual-somatic course, Sensual Being. Over the last few weeks, we’ve been practicing getting a felt-sense of what being disconnected from our senses feels like so that we can come back into awareness of ourselves.
We can use how we disconnect as a tool that helps us reconnect.
Here’s how.