Sensation exercises

Dr. Kenneth Walker

"At a very much later date the great importance of the faculty of attention in our work was again brought home to us. This was after Ouspensky's death, when some of us went over to Paris to study under G himself. G immediately taught us a number of exercises in muscle-relaxing and in what he called 'body-sensing', exercises which were and still are of greatest value to us. We were told to direct our attention in a predetermined order to various sets of muscles, for example, those of the right arm, the right leg, the left leg and so on, relaxing them more and more as we come round to them again; until we have attained what we feel to be the utmost relaxation possible for us. Whilst we were doing this we had at the same time to 'sense' that particular area of the body; in other words to become aware of it. We all know, of course, that we possess limbs, a head and a body, but in ordinary circumstances we do not feel or sense them. But with practice the attention can be thrown on to any part of the body desired, the muscles in that particular area relaxed, and sensation from that region evoked. At the word of inner command the right ear is 'sensed', then the left ear, the nose, the top of the head, the right arm, right hand and so on, until a 'sensation' tour has been made of the whole body. The exercise can, if required, be rendered still more difficult by counting backwards, by repeating strings of words or by evoking ideas at the same moment that the relaxing and sensing is being carried out.

"The question may well be asked: 'What benefit can possibly result from learning all these yogi tricks with the body?' This is not difficult to answer. There are three reasons for doing such exercises as these: the first is that it is excellent training for the attention; the second that it teaches a person how to relax; and the third that it produces a very definite inner psychic change. This change can be summed up in the statement that the exercise draws together parts of our mechanism which previously had been working disconnectedly. But external descriptions of these valuable exercises and of the results obtained from them are quite useless. They can only be understood by personal experience of them, a fact which emphasizes once again the impossibility of imparting knowledge of this kind in a book. All special exercises of this kind have to be taught by word of mouth, and, so far as I know, they have never been committed to writing.