Where seeing becomes sensing becomes saying. Forever becoming. Forever unfinished.
On Sensing
The body is the first altar. Long before we built temples or wrote prayers, we felt the rain on our skin, pressed our hands to trees, let sound move through us like water. On Sensing is an invitation to return to that — to the embodied knowing that lives below language, below thought, in the place where sensing and being are not yet two different things.
Whatever you create or discover here — hold it lightly. Do not get married to what arrives. Allow it to breathe and morph. It likely has more to teach you than you are able to receive right now.
The practices
Altar Building
An altar is a conversation with what you love. At the center of this practice is a daily Kali altar — tended each morning, a living threshold between the devotional and the ordinary. Beyond the personal altar, this practice extends into ritual altars built for retreats and individual sessions — sometimes arranged around the Tarot major arcana, each card placed with intention. And then there are the earth mandalas — co-created with natural objects found in place, assembled on the ground, left there when the work is done. Mother Earth dismantles them in her own time.
SoulCollage
Images chosen before the mind intervenes. In SoulCollage, you move through a field of cut images — your hands finding what calls to them — and then sit with what has gathered. Working both in the traditional form and digitally on Procreate, the practice remains the same: following the hand, trusting the image. In one powerful variation, images are approached with eyes closed. And then the card speaks: "I am one who..." The answers that arrive are often surprising, sometimes uncomfortable, always more true than what the thinking mind would have offered.
⚠ Images needed: physical collages and Procreate digital collages
Chakradance
The body moved by sound rather than intention. Chakradance is danced in a darkened room lit only by candlelight — what John O'Donohue called oblique light, which has hospitality for shadow. Eyes closed, the visual field released, something else becomes available. What arises can surprise even the dancer. No experience needed. No performance required.
⚠ Images needed: atmospheric candlelit space
Dreamwork
Dreams speak in images, not arguments. Particular attention is paid to the surprising element — the image that doesn't belong in the story. The shiny bright red car in the midst of an otherwise wild landscape. The door that opens onto nothing. These are the dream's most alive moments — the places where something is trying to get through.
⚠ Images needed: Firefly imaginal image with quality of a dream's surprising element
Embodied Writing
Sometimes the poem begins in the hand. Sometimes it begins in the heart — a feeling not yet named, entering the psyche as a climate before it becomes a word. Powerful forms include the found poem and the French pantoum. One tension this practice holds honestly: once a word is written down, other possibilities foreclose. Everything written here is understood as provisional — not cast in stone, but one possible crystallization of something that remains, underneath, still fluid.
⚠ Images needed: hands on paper, or a found poem
Art Making — Digital, Physical, Material
The medium could be ink or stylus, canvas or tablet, clay, beads, paper folding, finger-painting, doodling — and the deliberately child-like: chalk, crayons, the finger moving directly through paint. These simpler media are especially good companions for the preverbal. One such piece lives on the altar right now — made from modeling clay at a workshop many years ago, holding something it was never meant to hold. It knows what it is. The maker is still learning.
⚠ Images needed: clay piece on altar, child-like media in use
Walking on the Earth
The oldest practice. Feet as organs of perception, the body in conversation with what it moves through. One of the most direct forms: standing barefoot on wet soil or mud — the earth cold and alive beneath the soles, the boundary between body and ground suddenly uncertain in the best possible way.
⚠ Images needed: barefoot on wet soil — personal photograph if available
Breath, Vocalization, Humming, Chanting
In ancient Indian understanding: Naad Brahman — sound as the most primordial expression of the divine. Before thought, before language, before form, there was sound. The voice as the body's most ancient instrument. The breath as the body's most honest prayer — which can one moment sound like invocation, the next moment longing, and the next, lamentation.
⚠ Images needed: atmospheric — sound or breath made visible
Working with the Senses — Scent, Spice, Taste, Texture
Scent arrives before thought. It bypasses the analytical mind entirely and lands directly in the oldest part of the brain. This practice extends to taste and texture — eating with the kind of attention we rarely bring to food, noticing the complexity of a single spice on the tongue. Slowing down is the practice.
⚠ Images needed: spices, texture, close-up photograph
Scientific Image Analysis and Data Visualization
The trained eye moving across a confocal image knows something before the mind can name it. Scientific image analysis is, at its most alive, a somatic practice: the body of the scientist in conversation with the body of the data. And then there is the discipline of the second look — when the data appears too perfect. The trained mind pauses and asks: is this real, or is this bleedthrough? That question is a tool of honesty and integrity.
⚠ Images needed: confocal microscopy image chosen for visual beauty
Sitting with a Being of Nature
Some beings have been paying attention far longer than we have. Here, the East River is a particular teacher — a brackish tidal estuary, the river that flows both ways. For someone else, this could be an old tree, a lake, a dandelion growing from a crack in a seawall, a puddle of rainwater filling with cherry blossom petals. The being doesn't need to be grand. It needs only to be attended to.
⚠ Images needed: puddle with cherry blossom petals, East River, dandelion in seawall
When the body knows something words haven't found yet — follow it into On Saying.
Enter On Saying