Developing balanced sensory awareness – Feeing your back and into what is behind you

Balanced sensory awareness can be experienced as an awareness that is evenly distributed between the six aspects of our body (front, back, left, right, top, bottom) and the corresponding directions that surround us (in front, behind, to the left, right, above and below).
Because four of our senses are based toward the front of our head, the bias of our sensory awareness tends to be focused to the front, with subsidiary awareness of the left and right.
General Qi gong practice opens us up also to awareness of the sky and stars above, and planetary qi below.
Which direction is left out of the equation? Yep, it is behind, and using the back of our head, neck and back (as in back of torso) to feel and sense into our world.

Consciously focusing our awareness in the back of our body and learning to sense and feel into what is behind us is an interesting exercise:

• It makes us stop and think/be aware, as it provides us with a new perspective that we do not often focus on
• It gets us out of our mind and into our body
• It brings our overall sensory awareness into balance
• It teaches us to not over-rely upon our visual sense, and to “feel” and “hear” into our world more
• It develops our tactile sense, as the back of our body has no other major sense organs, just the sense of energy and touch coming through the skin receptors
• It is just a pleasant way of re-experiencing your world
Focusing on feeling your back and what is behind you is something that you can do anytime as a mindfulness exercise that will help you balance your overall sensory awareness and get you out of your head.

• You can do it whilst walking along (hint: don’t totally loose awareness of what is in front of you!)
• You can find a piece of open space and practice walking slowly and mindfully backwards, sensing with the back of your body as you go.
• You can take a one minute pause when you are working in front of your computer and just spend that minute focusing on what you feel in your back.
• It is nice to go out and try and sense landscape around you through the back of your body, rather than just seeing and experiencing it from the front and what is in your line of eye-vision

© Toby Ouvry, you are welcome to use this article, but you must seek Toby’s permission first. Contact info@tobyouvry.com

Previous articles on directional awareness:

Balancing your awareness of the six directions

Meditating on extending the six directions and drawing back Wu qi