How We Learn - Noticing

What is your experience right now as you read this?  Notice your eyes, can you sense them resting in your eye sockets, in your head?  Do your eyes reach for the words or does the image of the words come into your eyes?  Can you feel your contact with whatever you are sitting upon?  How does your head rest upon your neck and spine - is it right on top or does it sit forward or to one side?  What is your sense of your shoulders?  How are you breathing?  Where does your tongue sit in your mouth?  Can you simply notice these things or do you jump to judging their 'rightness' or 'wrongness'?

How much of your experience do you notice?  When you take action - reaching for a spoon, standing up from sitting, starting a new job - do you notice your actual experience in your body?

We cannot learn without noticing.  The degree to which we notice our experience determines what we learn.

Yet many of us have taught ourselves to not-notice, to ignore.  Quite often this can be attributed to confusing 'noticing' with 'judging'.  If for instance when you notice your shoulders you immediately jump to:  'my shoulders are rounded and up by my ears - I should pull them back and down' you completely bypass noticing what is actually going on.  This can frequently lead to ignoring your experience since the judgments usually bring up things we'd prefer to leave forgotten.

Noticing is,,,, noticing.  Becoming aware of what is going on.  Judging is forming an opinion about it in relation to an agenda or belief.

Notice your shoulders.  What are the sensations you experience?  Are they hanging in gravity?  Pulling up?  Tight, heavy, light, forward, back, warm, cold?  What if you move them up towards your ears, what's that like?  What if you move one up as the other goes down, then reverse?  What if you round them forward?  What is your chest doing as you do that?  Your head?  Your back?

As you notice the sensations of your shoulders do emotions come up?  How about thoughts, or stories of how they ought to be or 'once when I was six......'? 

When we notice our experience we find out a great deal, both about the present and how the past is influencing it.  It is the beginning of learning, the beginning of action, and the basis of our response to the actions we take.

Practice noticing with simple things, like shoulders, or breathing.  Then bring that to more complex experiences, like talking with an acquaintance, friend, or co-worker.  What is the feeling in your chest, stomach, or shoulders?  How is your breathing effected?  Your jaw?

Or notice your experience when driving on the freeway.  Or sitting down for a cup of coffee or tea.  Notice the sensations of your butt on the chair, your belly, the muscles around your eyes.  What do you notice after the first sip?  The second cup?

Begin to notice your experience and you begin to learn from experience. 

Just notice.

This is how our lives begin to take on dimension, become more rich and vivid.  Just by noticing what happens, what you experience.  This is how we learn, this is how we form and refine our intentions, this is how we learn to act in ways that move us towards our intentions.