This morning it is a wet and windy Sunday morning. Each Sunday morning is an extended morning of rest. It is a morning of practice. I practice slowly coming to my senses. It is a morning in which I practice deep caring for body and soul. This is a practice of awareness of sensationalism of life moment to moment.

We are beings of senses.

We make sense of our world via senses. The senses are gateways. They keep us locked into a certain reality but they can be medium of freedom from limitation we call “our life.” For too long religion has labelled senses as something “not quite nice.” For too long we have separated our senses as being something “not spiritual.” Many of our religions have done same with sensational experience we call sex.

As an Aman Cara I teach spirituality of senses. I teach what Van Morrison calls “A sense of wonder.” An Anam Cara teaches you to honour sensuality and grace of body. They teach you to honour this grace by letting go “disgrace that is inherent in our social conditioning. Our nature is nature of grace and not illusion of disgrace. Our nature is nature of beauty.

Coming to our senses is what I call, “The feeling way.”

Being attentive to senses allows life to be felt as sensational. We tend to see that which is sensational as being outside ourselves. We gather more and more sensational images in our newspapers, on our televisions and from other media forms. We ourselves do not enter sensational. Thus we lock ourselves out of heaven. This heaven is this wonder called “life” in eternal now.

We do not enter sensational realisation that we are “flow of life.”

We have become non-sensible people. We have become cerebral people. We try to “make sense.” We do not attune ourselves to being “able to sense.” This is not surprising. As children we felt sensational. We knew in ways we have forgotten.

We knew what we liked and did not like. We just did not have words to explain. This was until we were told that trusting our senses was "not nice." It could mean that you told truth and God help us someone might then be offended. You might have known that Joe Bloggs was not safe to be around but you overrode this fact by being told that you were not “being nice.”

Thus your sensational body and its wondrous intelligence were swapped for experience of “niceness in all things.” You took first steps away from trusting your “inner telling sense.” For most of us experience of trusting ourselves was downhill from there on in.

An Anam Cara encourages you to return to wisdom of body and senses. This is whole body and not just from neck up. The Anam Cara values your sensitivity. They value trust in your sensitivity. The senses take you into a deeper appreciation of beauty than any cerebral description. The senses take you into place of now. This is only time you have to be alive. This is only place where you can have time of your life.

Developing sensitivity means trusting wisdom of senses.

It means trusting wisdom of body. It means trusting your inner knowing. This is your intuition and your inner teaching. It requires ability to feel feelings that flow in, or are blocked in, body. These are all feelings. Thus you begin to perceive life in body and not life in head. Your body becomes a vehicle for seeing real life beyond “thinking about” your life.

Coming to your senses makes you more sensible.

In my family’s Roman Catholic religious tradition, we had “wakes” when someone died. A wake consisted of displaying body in an open casket for several days before funeral mass and burial. Friends and family would come to pay their respects to dead one and her immediate family.

During my mother’s wake, two of my elderly cousins appeared one afternoon together. Giovanni and Giuseppe were brothers, and rather colorful Sicilian characters. They bustled into funeral home, rushing headlong to back room of building.

Kneeling before casket with bowed heads, they offered a silent prayer. As they rose to their feet, they looked, for first time, into casket. After exchanging long, shocked glances with each other, Giovanni finally blurted out, “That’s not Aunt Mary!”

Giovanni and Giuseppe had gone into wrong room. As it happened that day, there were two wakes at funeral home. The brothers had not bothered to check which room my mother’s wake was in.

Later on, we had a large dinner party to celebrate my mother’s life, as is Sicilian custom. And we all had a good laugh at Giovanni’s and Giuseppe’s colossal blunder.

On a more serious note, I got to thinking later about how often we do same thing my cousins did. Except we do it in our relationships with live human beings.

How often do we not even bother to look and see who this person before us is? We just plough thoughtlessly and blindly ahead, not caring enough to really look and see.

Chief Joseph