Come to Your Senses: Exercises to Inspire Personal Exploration and Self Discovery

Creative Living in Technicolor Is your life flat or full? Does life seem one-dimensional or multi-faceted? Do you experience life in black and white or in Technicolor? We often race so quickly through our lives that we forget to stop and smell the roses. A wise and inspired man by the name of Leonardo da Vinci once said, "The five senses are the ministers of the soul." One way to enrich our existence is to expand our ability to live through our senses. Once inspired, we literally and figuratively come to our senses and begin to live in a state of gratitude and marvel at the textures, tastes, and sounds that reveal themselves each and every day.

Let Your Senses Show You How To Celebrate Life Think back for a moment and remember a time when you felt truly alive. What comes to mind when you recall that experience? Perhaps the tingling of your skin, brilliant colors or the way light sparkled, a pulsing heart, a delicious smell that curled into your nostrils or a flavor that made your mouth pop! Your senses: sight, sound, touch, taste, and smell are portals to rich experiences. Spend time playing and rediscovering the power of your senses and it will transform the ordinary into the extraordinary.

Exercises to Awaken Your Senses Through Exploration and Self Discovery The key to awakening your senses is to get out of your head and into your body. Although you can read about the power of your senses, your own experience will teach you the benefits of living a more sensory life. Take action! Use exercises like the ones below to intentionally become present in your day-to-day life. Exercise 1: Seeing with Eyes of Love and Wonder Look into the face of someone you cherish. Invite them to share this experience. Spend several minutes in quiet observation and reverence. What can you learn about this beloved? What do you see that you have never seen before? How does your heart feel in response to such an intimate viewing? Exercise 2: Clear Vision Experience with clear vision what you see, instead of interpreting. Once the colors, shapes, and images become good or bad, pretty or ugly, familiar or unfamiliar, you have stepped away from a clear view. Describe in your journal a sunset, an oak tree, or the moment at dusk when all is in shadow. Describe it with your sense of sight in vivid detail. Do not stop until you have captured it all. Once you have set your pen down, read through your description. Notice how many details you would normally miss with a casual glance. What surprises can you find in your observation? Exercise 3: Capture the Music of Your Life Take some time to reflect on your life and discover what sounds still ripple in your memory. A puppy's excited bark, the sound of the 10 PM train, the melody of instruments from the kitchen as your mother prepared Sunday breakfast, a cat's quiet purr, thunder rolling down off the ridge as a storm was approaching, the kettle whistling or the sound of a deep breath. We don't always notice the nuances of sounds, but when we do, the moment is far richer. Master the skill of listening with your whole body. Have an attitude of gratitude and compassion to the story the other person is sharing. This kind of intentional listening is a real gift to give and receive. Exercise 4: Touch Awareness DayThe idea of touch may conjure the obvious: a warm hug, a firm handshake, or a gentle massage; but how many things do you touch each day that you don't even notice? What if you went through one day paying attention to everything you touched and noticed how everything felt? Create your very own Touch Awareness Day and watch for surprises. Expand your touch capacity even further by going through one day consciously touching everything with loving hands. Exercise 5: The Taste and Smell of InspirationPlan a feast for yourself and a few friends. Choose the location, menu and table setting to reflect your personal tastes. Feature your favorite wine, foods, and desserts. Once prepared and ready sit and enjoy each dish with great attention. Describe the smell of each food and take your first bites all together. Savor the flavors and then share with one another how the tastes affect you. Acknowledge the feelings your body is experiencing because of the tastes and smells. Be inspired to embrace how different life is when you come to your senses.

Corrie Woods is a Women's Life Coach and author of The Woman's Field Guide to Exceptional Living. Through coaching, personal growth retreats, teleclasses and writing she supports and inspires women. Explore free resources at http://www.womansfieldguide.com.

Learn How To Activate Your Personal Development To Achieve Your Dreams

Have you lost touch with your dreams? Perhaps as you have gotten older life has slowly made you "realize" that you need to be practical and give up on your dreams. Perhaps all you concentrate on now is your committments and responsibilities. Perhaps you have lost that fire within you that once drove you to imagine wonderful possibilities. Has life left you without dreams?

As we grow older and bigger our dreams and life expectations tend to get smaller. However, if you would still like to achieve your dreams and are willing to take some action to get them then read on!

The key and starting point for achieving anything in life lies in your mind. Before you can have, be or do anything you must first be able to envisage yourself being able to be, do or have the thing you desire. When you get your mind right the rest will fall into place almost effortlessly!

As a child no one could tell you that things were impossible. You believed in wizards, enchanted forests, mythical beats and magical lands. You also believed that anything was possible and that it was possible for you to have anything you wanted. This mental ability to believe in the impossible was slowly trained out of you as you grew older. However, if you want to achieve the things in life that you have always dreamed of achieving then you must regain this child-like faith in achieving the seemingly impossible.

By believing that you can achieve something you have done 90% of the work already! Without going into the quantum physics behind the power of thought just be aware that your thoughts are more powerful than you can comprehend. Science is proving that thoughts have very real creative power in a very tangible and physical way. They have the ability to rebuild your world.

However, on a more practical note, your thoughts are also the things that motivate you to take action. If you believe that you can succeed at something and feel optimistic about a successful outcome then you are much more likely to try it!

The first step is to practise imagining that you already have the things that you want. Close your eyes and visualize yourself in possession of your dreams already. Your ability to imagine and visualize things that do not yet exist is just like any other ability that you possess. Although it is natural and an inherent ability that you have been born with it gets weakened through lack of use. However, it will improve with exercise.

By visualizing, on a daily basis, your dreams as already having been accomplished you will begin to find that your imagined scenes become more vivid and life-like. You will also find yourself able to create mental images of yourself having things that before you didn't even consider. This happens as you start to enjoy the mental "acquisition" of your desires. A symptom of this is that you will begin to aquire faith that your visualized image is actually possible for you to achieve.

So, what are the nuts-and-bolts of exercising your imagination so that it creates unshakable faith in you? Well it is as easy as setting aside 15 minutes in the morning and 15 minutes at night!

Start small. Begin with a goal that is not too big that you will get discouraged but that is not too small to be easily achieved. Choose something that you really want. Then for 15 minutes each morning and 15 minutes each night visualize yourself already having it. Conjure up as much strong positive emotion around your mental image as you - this is important!

Now evoking positive emotions around your mental image should not be hard if your mental scene incorporates something that you really want. When we imagine having things we want we naturally start to feel good.

Soon you will find yourself feeling that you either already have the thing you have been visualizing or you will feel that you are definitely going to have it. When this happens you will begin to take actions, sometimes unconsciously sometimes deliberately however most times it is both. The actions that you begin to take will start to bring you closer to the achievement of your goal. As you take more of these inspired action steps you will find that eventually your imagined scene becomes real!

Once you succeed at small things begin to think bigger until you can imagine yourself living the life that you want on your terms.

When you start to think bigger then you begin to get bigger results!

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