After you have made consciously observing one of your daily activities a habit, the next question comes into play: What do I sense when I do that?
Observing and noting what you feel or sense when you do a certain activity is important to gain an understanding of the effects on your body, which in turn can guide you in both preventing and resolving health issues.
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But let’s return to the question What do I sense? I think that an example is the best way to enlighten this subject, and I’ll discuss “washing the dishes.” This is just an example, and the questions asked can apply to any other activity, such as having a shower, putting your pants on, gardening, climbing the stairs, or even to the sort of food you eat, and whatnot.
Now, when you wash the dishes (I mean manually, without using a dishwasher), do you feel pressure, effort, discomfort, tension, or perhaps pain somewhere in your body?
Perhaps you lean on your right leg and you feel the effort of your muscles in the right leg or maybe you sense tension in your knee?
How do you breathe? Is it relaxed, fast, hurried, deep or shallow breathing? How’s your heartbeat?
How do your arms and wrists feel while cleansing the dishes and moving them from here to there?
Are your shoulders feeling relaxed, or are they perhaps raised and tensed? And what about your back, neck, and head?
Keep in mind that apart from having a certain way of doing things, and how that feels in your body, your physical actions and how they feel may be influenced by additional factors.
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For instance, if you’re tired, or are hurried because you run late for this or that activity afterwards, or the sink is too low or the water too cold, or because you simply don’t like to wash the dishes, emotional factors come into play.
That means you will probably notice certain “additional” effects in your body, such as perhaps feeling entirely tensed, or experiencing fast and shallow breathing, sensations that may not occur when emotional factors are not involved.
Apart from monitoring bodily sensations in your daily activities, answering the question “What do I sense?” is also particularly important when you intentionally engage in body testing or when you do things differently, which are activities I discuss in the dedicated articles about these topics.
So, “What do I sense?” is a crucial question whose answers not only align you better with your body but will also inform you if changes are needed or not.
That is, when you are consciously aware of undue discomforts, tensions, or pains, they will necessarily prompt you to resolving those.
