Living sensually

The antidote to an age of abstraction

The other day, I was lying in Shavasana, sweat dripping down my sides. We’d just finished class. 75 minutes. 34°C. My mind was still. The room was quiet, with the exception of the slowing, heavy breaths of fellow yogis. Then I heard light footsteps behind me. Moments later, the instructor began waving a towel over my head. Not just any towel. The most delicious-smelling towel I’ve ever encountered.

For a brief second, the room disappeared. It was just me and the traces of sandalwood, lavender, and palo santo. It was one of those brief but complete moments of sensory absorption that have quietly infused my everyday with meaning. I realized then that this is the practice that has changed me most this past year: living sensually.

When you’re fully immersed in your senses, time stands still. You know this if you’ve ever had a bite of food that stopped you mid-sentence. You pause. There is nothing but you and the explosion of sensation unfolding in your body. Everything else can wait.

This is the miracle of our sensing capacities: the mind dissolves inside direct experience. There’s no space for the constant ups and downs of mental chatter. If you are truly inside your body’s senses, you cannot simultaneously be inside your mind’s stories.

Ancient Eastern wisdom teaches that the density of moments spent in direct experience is one of the best proxies for a free and happy life. But modern life has stripped away sensory richness while systematically feeding the mind.

What was once our default is now something we have to actively reclaim.

---

an evolutionary mismatch

For most of human history, life was sensorially dense. You woke and immediately felt the air on your skin. You smelled the morning. The smoke from last night’s fire. The damp earth. Your body was in constant conversation with the world.

Now most environments are engineered to be neutral. Climate-controlled. Odorless. The same bright lighting. The same sterile desk. The same hum of electricity.

Very little ever presses itself into your awareness strongly enough to fully absorb you. And when nothing absorbs you, the mind fills the vacuum. Thought becomes the dominant texture of your life—not because you chose it, but because sensation no longer interrupts it.

Screens have accelerated this shift. They didn’t just change our lifestyle. They changed how we experience reality. They pulled us away from the three-dimensional world and into a flat, virtual one.

Screens are sensorially impoverished by design. They give you sight and sound—only two out of dozens of your sensory capacities.¹ There’s no experiential depth. You can spend three hours moving your finger across glass without a single minute being summoned into your body.

Screens overstimulate the mind and understimulate the senses. This creates a split: the mind becomes hyperactive while the body is underfed.

And an underfed sensory system produces a restless mind.

This loop is the dilemma of modern life.

---

life in abstractions

We now live more conceptually than sensorially. We interact with representations of reality instead of reality itself. We watch instead of do. We text instead of call. We scroll images and videos of people instead of feeling their presence. Even money—when is the last time your hands have touched cash?

Your nervous system evolved to interact with physical reality. Instead, it spends most of its time interacting with abstractions. And abstractions never fully satisfy—leaving you in a constant state of low-grade incompletion. The mind keeps spinning because nothing has fully landed in the body. You think about life more than living it. You become a commentator of life instead of a participant.

The senses collapse that distance. When you are inside a sensation—a smell, a sound, a sight or taste—there is no narrative. There is only experience. And experience is always now. Presence, then, doesn’t have to be forced. You don’t have to sit cross-legged and reach for it in the muddy waters of your mind. It can be entered.

Your senses are the doorway. That’s why living sensually is a spiritual practice. When you are in your senses, you are in intimate relationship with the present moment. Not in the past. Not in the future. Not planning, not worrying. Just here.

---

the world that’s waiting

There are endless ways to return to sensing. Living sensually is not something you do in isolation—it is a way of life. It is woven into the fabric of your days.

It all starts with a clear intention to peel yourself away from screens more often. A rich life is built from small, ordinary moments—if you make space for them, and if you let them matter.

Light incense and candles. Let the scents fill the room. Walk barefoot on the grass. Feel the ground beneath your feet. Take an extra minute in the morning to absorb the sun on your skin. Slow down when you eat. Let yourself fully taste your food. Do one thing at a time. Extend hugs and surrender into them. Wear fabrics that feel soft against your skin. Call instead of text. Meet instead of call. Close your eyes and dissolve into music. Take the time to look at nature, really look.

These moments may seem small. But they are portals. They bring you back into direct contact with reality. And when you are in direct contact with reality, the mind quiets.

Let your senses guide you back into the dance between your body and the world around you. Feel yourself dissolve into the present moment. This is where you will find your freedom, and happiness, and safety. This is your home.

Now put down your screen. Reality is waiting.

With love,

More from my universe

• Download Atoon for immersive journeys to help you feel more and think less

• Get on the waitlist for upcoming yoga and medicine retreats

• Download my free psychedelics beginners guide or integration workbook

1. New research suggests that humans have not five but up to 33 senses.