The Eight Senses
Seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, & touching, meet orienting, navigation, and regulating.*
The five basic senses, plus three that integrate us as moving, responding and reacting beings:
First: See it. Hear it. Smell it. Taste it. Touch it.
Then: Orient yourself in it. Navigate through it. Regulate yourself in response to it.
Discernment requires us to first gather our data with integrity, seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, touching to take in information to feed our body and mind. The context we need to process that information, those instructions, comes from the other three senses, our orientation and how we move through space and what our body does in response. Our involuntary experiences of this can include noticing after the fact how stressed we get in traffic. Our intentional experiences can include choosing to listen to music to relax because we know it works.
A Matter of Taste work covers this ground too. Our design of experiences focuses on how each participant creates a body memory of success and engagement. The four part structure we use for every workshop we do, whether public or for a specific group with specific goals, follows a flow that intentionally links all of these senses together.
With flavor and food-based experiences, we will always delight the eye, nose and palate, and with makes, tastes and discussions, there’s plenty to touch and hear as well. Five senses, check! It’s the four part structure that brings the other three senses, orientation, navigation, and regulation, into play.
Smelling Formosa Oolong Tea
The moment of meditation, both feet on the ground, that Joanna leads in our opening Mindful Orientation step of each workshop flow establishes our purpose and mindset. We clear ourselves of what came before this moment, and intentionally anchor ourselves in the here and now (usually with a sip of something nice.)
The Guided Learning steps we use to build memory with practice, rituals of tasting together, welcome us to move in the space of new knowledge, gracefully learning paths and patterns. Learning to navigate builds curiosity and confidence!
But to fully experience something, we have to make it our own, feel our own responses to it, and that is the Discovery by Doing part of the agenda, where participants re-create, personalize, and internalize what we have explored. Self-directed practice invites our reactions, intuitive or considered, adding experiential layers to our learning and self-regulation.
By the time our workshops close with our Fostering Action activities, each person has already brought the experience fully into themselves. Whether it’s meaningful measures and ethical chocolate, flower tea blending for focus and perspective, or movement and mocktails, thinking about how to apply, connect, or extend what we’ve done is easy and natural. That’s the sign of an experience that leaves you changed.
I’m proud of the strong basis we use to design and develop our offerings because I know we are aiming for a worthwhile true north, enabling discerning optimism. That comes from intentional care to provide truly unique experiences that satisfy all of our senses, that welcome, engage, inform, orient, lift and support, and leave each of us that much more ready to be who we need to be. The lofty goals are anchored in method, science, technique, and our experience, and it’s an honor to be able to weave them together to create these offerings.
And in practice….what does that look like? It’s recognizing that to taste with nuance, it may be necessary to re-orient in space, so yes, try noise cancelling earbuds and take another bite of that chocolate, and notice the deep breath you took even as the sound retreated, and let that bite melt in your mouth and notice….the experience.
Noting the visual and auditory cue of Ground Work Tea
*This refers to eight sensory systems, visual, auditory, olfactory, tactile, vestibular, proprioceptive, and interceptive systems. Thanks to the STAR Institute for compiling this research!
This was NOT written or edited by AI.
