How highly tuned are your senses and how do you know?

I started asking myself these questions partly through my experiences of NLP and also because of a recent experience with a dog that has come to stay with me. He was suffering from 'separation anxiety' and could not be left alone. He had no name which surprised me as he was 14 months old and the rescue experts said they had tried naming him but he had not picked up on it. After a few days I noted that he was unable to understand what words meant. He seemed really friendly and affectionate and was always staring at me and following me around. I wondered if he was deaf but he wasn't. He looked confused and worried a lot of the time.

As I wondered how to help him and to calm him down I remembered how I'd seen James Shaw and Eric Robbie change a animals state so I started to experiment with what I 'saw' and 'felt' them do. It worked, for sure nothing like as elegantly as when those experts worked their magic but the dog was calmer. Once the dog was in the same state as me he started to model me. In this way we started to get some good patterns going, such as creating calm and sleepy quiet anchors to a particular blanket, liveliness and energy to his lead and so on. Soon he could read and use visual signals such as pointing and patting a surface. Once this was established I started to overlap and use my words very carefully so they were clear and different sounding (Eric gave me some great advice).

Now the dog knows his name, bed, lie down and good. He is enjoying playing with musical toys (its amazing what you can get now) and it is working well getting him to locate them through sound and activate them by biting. This first is a great game as it takes him ages to work out where it is and he sometimes needs a lot of help. In the last few days he has started making little noises and so is finding his voice. The experience of helping this dog coupled with the experience of training with Eric Robbie and developing my own senses (with the result that the world seems like a very different place) has got me wondering what your experiences have been.


How aware are you of the sensitivity of your own senses?
How can you tell if one sense is operating less well than it could be?
Do you know which of your senses is the most highly developed?
Are you ever aware of overlapping the senses?
How did you notice that your senses could be sharper?
How did you know notice that your senses had become sharper and what changed their sensitivity?

Hi Carol,

I remember when I first noticed that my sensed had been sharpened when I was driving in my car - I was feeling good and relaxed and suddenly a car beeped its horn at me and I was immediately aware of the 'fear response' in my body down the opposite of my body to the side that the beep of the horn came.... this made me quite shocked - noticing these sensations so clearly as I had jumped in the car before, but obviously had been sensitorily (is that a word?) numb.

From then on I had a greater sense of how the fear response operates and feels in me - the fact that it was the opposite side was that it was working to pull me away from the alert and danger signal... was a revelation to me to 'see' my body working in that way that I had never notice before.

On Eric's Sensory Acuity course, we did an exercise where we paired up with someone and were asked to say which hand they were holding a coin in. Prior to that, I'd done an exercise I'd not been happy about my results with. That led to a state change, to one in which I was more playful, and noticed that I noticed more.

For instance, I picked up on the colouration of the veins in the partner's hands. But it wasn't just a passive process -- I felt very in control of what was happening, in a fashion I can only describe as impish. Dealing with my partner was like a kitten toying with a mouse: I KNEW I was right.

And I was -- 8 times out of 8, I 'guessed' which hand the coin was in. And told him on that last time, in my impish fashion, 'I'm going to deliberately get it wrong now, so you don't feel so bad, and get to have a go yourself.' Which is exactly what happened.

During this impish phase, all of my senses were sharpened -- and the impishness itself I suspect came from that greater awareness, knowing I could toy with/work with/whatever so much more effectively.

adrian r wrote:

On Eric's Sensory Acuity course, we did an exercise where we paired up with someone and were asked to say which hand they were holding a coin in. Prior to that, I'd done an exercise I'd not been happy about my results with. That led to a state change, to one in which I was more playful, and noticed that I noticed more.

For instance, I picked up on the colouration of the veins in the partner's hands. But it wasn't just a passive process -- I felt very in control of what was happening, in a fashion I can only describe as impish. Dealing with my partner was like a kitten toying with a mouse: I KNEW I was right.

And I was -- 8 times out of 8, I 'guessed' which hand the coin was in. And told him on that last time, in my impish fashion, 'I'm going to deliberately get it wrong now, so you don't feel so bad, and get to have a go yourself.' Which is exactly what happened.

During this impish phase, all of my senses were sharpened -- and the impishness itself I suspect came from that greater awareness, knowing I could toy with/work with/whatever so much more effectively.

Reminds me of these exercises we did during Tom V & Kim McF Rapport classes. Line up a few people, turn them around to face away from you, staring at a wall, So they will not have any V-A input from you. Pick one of them where you connect with - mentally .. and have them calibrate their bodily experience. The one who's been connected with will notice right away. Some will feel like they are pulled back, others will feel a warmth rising up their chest, ...

This is such a simple but powerful exercise everyone gets it right time after time, after a round or two.

Then you can do that with projecting emotions, deliberately disconnecting with someone, some like to project colors...

Your senses are more highly tuned then you are aware of imo, and simple exercises can bring to your attention, what you already are picking up on a subconscious level.

Cheers

Bart

adrian r wrote:

On Eric's Sensory Acuity course, we did an exercise where we paired up with someone and were asked to say which hand they were holding a coin in. Prior to that, I'd done an exercise I'd not been happy about my results with. That led to a state change, to one in which I was more playful, and noticed that I noticed more.

For instance, I picked up on the colouration of the veins in the partner's hands. But it wasn't just a passive process -- I felt very in control of what was happening, in a fashion I can only describe as impish. Dealing with my partner was like a kitten toying with a mouse: I KNEW I was right.

And I was -- 8 times out of 8, I 'guessed' which hand the coin was in. And told him on that last time, in my impish fashion, 'I'm going to deliberately get it wrong now, so you don't feel so bad, and get to have a go yourself.' Which is exactly what happened.

During this impish phase, all of my senses were sharpened -- and the impishness itself I suspect came from that greater awareness, knowing I could toy with/work with/whatever so much more effectively.