Sensual Journaling

Journaling can help us to raise awareness of our senses and to create richly sensual writing.

Life, for most of us, is a multisensory experience and it can be hard to imagine life without one of our five basic senses – sight, sound, smell, taste, and touch. Yet we often pay scant attention to them. We eat on the hoof or while watching screens, tune out background music, and barely notice the scent of flowers or the caress of a gentle breeze. On holiday, unusual sights, sounds, aromas, flavours, and textures tempt us out of autopilot mode. In our everyday life, we could choose to turn off our autopilot and ignore distractions to savour a meal, listen attentively or sniff the air while walking and then return to our tasks refreshed.

As a result of neurodiversity, we differ in our sensitivity to and the type and speed of processing of sensory inputs. Oversensitivity to external stimuli can be painful. Mindfulness as described by Jon Kabat Zinn in Full Catastrophe Living helped me to cope with my chronic pain by focussing on the pain. Each component: the tingling, burning, nettle-flaying, crushing, stabbing, and axe- chopping varies in its relative intensity. The pain is always there but it is fluctuating; intense components of the pain will always subside over time.

Mindfulness is the act of paying attention to the direct experience of your internal and external environment. It is an antidote to living in our heads where our thoughts often time-travel to the past or future. Free expressive journaling offers many of the benefits of mindfulness because the focus is on the process of writing. Words are allowed to flow rather than being deliberately chosen and combined.
Use journaling prompts to either focus on one sense or to capture a multisensory experience. Don’t think, just write in response to the following prompts as if you know what you are going to write.

A multisensory highlight of your day / this month / this season…
Sight is often our dominant sense.

What colour is resonating with you?
Reflections…
How does lighting affect your mood?

Sounds, music, and silence can have a dramatic impact on how we feel. Listening to the inflection, cadence, tone, pacing, and rhythm of a voice offers clues to the person’s age, emotions, status and so much more than the words alone convey.

The soundscape around you…
Relaxing sounds…
Silence…

Mental or physical illness and ageing may inhibit our sensory perception. I lost my sense of taste and smell while infected with Covid-19. It wasn’t recognised as a symptom back in March. I assumed that my food was flavourless until biting into the last of a bunch of radishes led to a peppery flavour explosion. A weird phase of phantom tastes, such as coffee tasting of smoked salmon, soon passed. It took six months to regain my ability to distinguish between freshly brewed and instant coffee. My awareness of nuances of flavour and aroma is now exceptional as if Covid-19 has turned me into a food, drink, and aroma connoisseur.

Our sense of smell is often closely related to our memory; aromas can reconnect us to vivid recollections of the past.

An alluring fragrance…
A stink…
The scents of the seaside…

The primary tastes are salty, sweet, sour, bitter and umami. Mixing them in various proportions and blending them with other sensual cues creates an almost infinite variety of flavours.

The multisensory experience of savouring your favourite food…
An acquired taste…
Flavours of your childhood…

Having to keep our distance from friends and family during the current pandemic has helped us to appreciate the importance of human touch to our wellbeing. On a tour of the Outer Hebrides, my fellow travellers were accompanied by sighted volunteers. Watching them explore the Callanish Stones by touch offered me the freedom to drop my ‘look but don’t touch’ mindset. My long-term reward is a more tactile life.

Holding hands…
Hugging a tree…
I love the feel of…

We have more than five senses including our nebulous ‘sixth sense’.

What sends tingles up your spine…
Sensing the atmosphere in a room full of people…
Who or what gives you the creeps?

Synaesthesia occurs when one of our senses simultaneously stimulates or is associated with another sense. Many of us associate tastes with colours – try eating a purple carrot (the natural colour) – and have experienced visual dream sequences evoked by strange sounds in the night. A few of us will experience synaesthesia routinely, for example seeing letters or numbers as having inherent colours.

Your experience of synaesthesia…

The romantic poets challenged the dominance of sight by blending and fusing it with other senses to create a multisensory experience in their reader’s mind. English has many phrases such as: feeling blue, light music and bitterly cold which stem from synaesthesia. Use journaling to experiment with combining senses creatively.

Describe a walk during wild weather…
Describe a live concert…
Describe a real or imagined place of complete safety and tranquillity…

When my inner Welsh dragon is in a flaming fury, I turn to journaling. To vent, to distract myself with uplifting gratitude or to focus inward. Paying attention to the internal signals that something is wrong, will often silence my alarm system and restore calm. We can use journaling to increase our self-awareness by tuning into our bodies, through our senses, not our thoughts.

I feel…

Frequent sensual journaling can raise our awareness of our bodies and the multitude of sensory delights around us. Giving us the incentive to opt out of autopilot mode. A sensual focus can help us to reconnect with seemingly long-forgotten memories. The richer the sensual detail, the easier it will be to recall each memory. Your journal will be a joy to read and a source of vibrant sensuality to enliven your writing.