On the Distinction Between Sensing and Feeling and How Each Causes Us to Move and Use Our Bodies Differently

This is part of an interview of Bonnie Bainbridge Cohen that originally appeared in Contact Quarterly and was also published in her book Sensing, Feeling and Action. Bonnie Bainbridge Cohen is the person who developed The School for Body Mind Centering. I think it is interesting material and has a loose but interesting relationship to flow and alignment concepts of yoga practice. And I would agree with her overall summation that you need a balance of the two.

upsidedowncarl

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CQ: What do you mean by ‘mind based’?

BC: Each individual goes into an area of study with a certain mind, and we usually keep the same mind throughout all of our explorations. What I’m doing now is trying to help people recognize the mind that they’re approaching something with, as compared to [the mind of] the material itself. For example, some people might feel things more through the bones, another person more through the muscles, some say they’re more into the senses. It’s different if you sense something, than if you feel it, than if you simply do it. Sensing is related to the nervous system through the perceptions. Feeling and flow are related to the fluid system including the circulatory, lymphatic and cerebral-spinal fluids. By approaching everything with the same mind, you are constantly initiating activity from the same place. For example, I think that a lot of people in Contact work are working with the senses—sensing where they are, feeling weights; they’re using their perceptual systems to initiate from, in particular the weight preceptors and the movement preceptors. But there’s a funny thing when you do that. The fluids are a counterbalance to the preceptors or the nervous system. So if the perceptual system is always initiating or being the mover, then the fluids are always having to be the support. There comes a time when you want to reverse that balance, when you want the perceptions to go quiet, to become the support and let the fluids become the mover. That’s when you go into simply moving, without sensing anymore, trusting that the senses have gone unconscious and will support you without them being conscious. When I say forgetting them, I mean letting them go unconscious and letting the fluids become the control.

Take a very large group of people, have them move in a very small space and have them move ‘sensing’. They’ll slow up; when people sense, there’s this slowing up of the fluids. Then have them drop that and move very quickly in a tight group with no sensing. What you’ll find is that you’re safer under fast movement with no sensing than you are under the slow sensing. However we’ve developed, we move best, more automatically, and more efficiently when we move quickly with fluidity—where the sensing goes unconscious and the fluids take the initiative—than when we move slowly with sensing. It happens over and over again. People are surprised that they feel safer under this fast moving than when they are sensing where each person is. And they’re less likely to bump into somebody and have an accident. Now if you take a group of people who have never sensed, and have them running, quickly, they’d probably be bumping into each other all the time. They’d be running into each other because they don’t know where they are.

CQ: So you are using the senses as a support for the fluids and if the senses have never been developed they can’t be a very stable support?

BC: Then the fluids have never been a support for the senses. It’s a balance. It’s not to choose one over the other but to have this balance. We have a tendency to get one-sided.

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